For no
good reason we made ‘oliebollen’ today, using our secret recipe. Well, it’s hardly a secret. It takes flour, sugar, eggs, butter, a sprinkle of salt, milk and yeast. What a coincidence: over at MetaFilter there was a discussion about sourdough too! Which I could relate too, as (many of the frequent visitors already know) I’m a pretty proficient ‘home-made-bread-maker-without-an-electronic-breadmaker’ myself too.
There’s something about making these kind of flour and yeast things. The best moment is not the final result, it’s actually the moment to find out that the dough has finally risen. If something went wrong in the mean time, your friendly one-celled bacteria may have bitten the dust. For example today, I stowed the bowls of dough away at quarter to 6, or say 6 PM. By 9:30, the dough had risen high enough to guarantee puffy nice ‘oliebollen’. That’s almost 4 hours, but looking at the dough, it was nearly perfect.
It must have been the weather.