Oliebollen
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Dutch Asteroids or Oliebollen Recept
On New Year's Eve the Dutch eat oliebollen. And drink beer. And champagne. And they eat other stuff too. But this page is about oliebollen. Now, oliebollen are simply DELICIOUS. However, if you translate the name into English it becomes "oil balls"... not very appetizing huh? So, I've renamed them. I call them Dutch Asteroids, or Meteors or maybe we can try calling them Dutch Rocks. Suggestions welcome!
In my opinion, the name asteroids suits them well. First of all, they kind of look like asteroids; especially if you follow my mom's recipe reproduced below which has a lot of raisins, currants, and bits of apple in it. Second, asteroids kind of make you think of stars, which kind of makes you think of fireworks, which kind of makes you think about New Year's... right?
Recipe
This is my mom's, but I think she based it on her mom's, who in turn based it on the recipe in Het Haagse Kookboek, the only "proper" cookbook any self respecting Dutch housewife would use 100 years ago.
Ingredients
For roughly 80 asteroids, you will need
- 1 kilo flour
- 750 ml milk, luke-warm
- 5 Granny Smith apples (they need to be a sour variety of apple)
- 250 grams of raisins (surprisingly, raisins are made of white grapes)
- 250 grams of currants (= raisins made of red grapes)
- 1 or 2 bottles of beer
- 50 grams of live yeast, or the equivalent in dry active yeast
- 5 eggs
- plenty of vegetable oil for deep frying (e.g. sunflower or canola oil, to fill a large pan)
- plenty of powdered sugar (a.k.a. confectioners sugar) to sprinkle on the asteroids / meteors / rocks once they are done
Preparation
1. Let the raisins + currants soak in beer overnight.
2. Peel the apple and chop it into little bits.
3. Dissolve the yeast in the luke-warm milk.
4. Mix the flour, salt and eggs one by one. Then slowly mix in the milk + yeast, taking care to get rid of all the lumps. THIS IS IMPORTANT, if you don't get the lumps out now, you never will, and you'll be chomping down on lumps of dry flour...
5. Gently mix in the bits of apple and the drained raisins + currants.
6. Cover the mix e.g. with a cloth, and let it rest in a warm place for about 4 hours. During this time it should roughly double / triple in volume.
7. Heat up the oil in a big pan. I set my deep fryer to max temp. You know the oil is hot enough if a piece of white bread starts to sizzle as soon as you throw it in the oil; and it should be brown when you take it out after just a few minutes. If the oil is too hot, the asteroids burn... if it is not hot enough the inside of the asteroids / meteors / rocks will be raw.
8. Scoop some of the asteroid dough into the oil with a spoon, and let it fry for a few minutes. The ball of dough will expand as it fries, so try a small one first. After a few minutes, the frying ball will either flip over by itself, or require a little nudge to do so. You will soon get a good idea of the ideal length of time.
9. Enjoy the asteroids with lots of powdered sugar. Mixing in some cinnamon in the powdered sugar can be good too.
ENJOY
