Zweiback, At Last

The morning after we made the jam, my mom and I made the zweiback. It was something I'd wanted to do since April when I found Marilyn Moore's Baking Memoir in Friendly Used Books. It was a good find, and, thrilled to have all these old familiar recipes at hand, I regaled my husband with recipes for peppernuts, kuchen and zweiback (and Moore's account of how her dad got kicked out of Tabor College, which, being Lutheran and unfamiliar with Tabor as well as unversed in my uncles' exploits at Grace Bible Institute, now Grace University he couldn't quite appreciate as much as I did) over supper at the Pizza Shoppe (in my defense, we'd walked to Benson for some shopping and supper -- so the book was sitting right there beside me in the booth).

I brought the book home with me to share with mom. At first, she was aghast that I spent $9.00 on a used book, but after she spent an afternoon looking at it, she wanted me to find her a copy on Amazon. She also decided that we should try Bertha Toevs' recipe (Moore refers to her as a zweiback expert: this means that her zweiback never come unstacked in the oven) rather than the one she had from Naomi Kauffman.

Both Naomi and Bertha are from Kansas, so the recipe my mom remembers from Henderson is probably slightly different than either of these. You'll notice that Bertha's recipe uses quite a bit more yeast. In Naomi's recipe, the dough needs to rise twice. In any case, though, the thing that really makes them zweiback (at least as I understand it), is the two-bun stack. In fact, my grandma told me her mom never made buns without stacking them.

Naomi's Recipe
(makes 4 to 5 dozen)

3 cups milk
2 tablespoons salt
6 tablespoons sugar, plus 1 teaspoon
1 cup Wesson oil
1/2 cup warm water
2 packages active dry yeast (1 package yeast is 2 1/4 teaspoons)
8-10 cups flour

Scald 2 cups milk and mix with the sugar and salt. Mix yeast in 1/2 cup water with sugar and let set until bubbly. Add last cup of cold milk and oil to first mixture. This cools it enough that the yeast can then be added. Now add flour until dough becomes fairly easy to handle, not sticky but not too stiff either. Grease and form ball in your bowl and cover to raise. Let rise 1 hour and knead. Then let rise another hour and form the zwieback. Put them on a greased cookie sheet and bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 10 to 12 minutes.

Pastor George and Naomi were at Zion Mennonite in Bridgewater for most of my growing up years. When I was in college, they left for another call at a church in Henderson. It's a small Mennonite world.

Bertha's Recipe (as told by Marilyn Moore)
(makes about 3 dozen)

2 cups whole milk, scalded
1 cup unsalted butter or margarine, melted
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 tablespoon salt
1 cup warm water
2 to 3 tablespoons active dry yeast
8 to 9 cups all-purpose flour (unbleached flour can be used, but don't use bread flour)

Bertha includes the specifics for how to mix everything together, but every bread maker has a method that works best so I'll just tell you what we did.

My mom didn't have whole milk on hand, so we used skim milk, which we combined with the butter and sugar in a saucepan. We put it over low heat until the butter melted and the sugar dissolved. (Note that scalding milk in the old-fashioned sense generally isn't necessary. Our milk is pasteurized, so we don't need to worry about getting it hot enough to kill bacteria, unless you need to be at one with the natural food chain.) Once that happened, we set it aside to cool. If it's too hot, it will kill the yeast. A good general rule of thumb: If the temperature is comfortable to your wrist, it won't hurt the yeast.

While the milk mixture was heating, we combined the yeast, warm water and a couple teaspoons of honey in a tall water glass. This is something my mom taught me to do when I first started baking. The honey -- or sugar -- gives the yeast something to feed on and you can make sure the yeast is good before adding it to the rest of the ingredients.

When the milk was lukewarm, we added the yeast and three cups of flour and beat it with a wooden spoon until smooth. Then, we gradually added enough flour to make a soft (but not sticky), smooth dough, eventually turning it out to knead -- a little less than 10 minutes.

In all, we probably used about 8 1/2 cups of flour. And the dough was very soft -- when I picked it up, it seeped through my finger.

At this point, we put the dough in a greased bowl and let it rise until doubled (then punched it down).

And then it was time to start shaping the zweiback. We divided the dough in half and then kneped it. The dough is so soft, that it's a little tricky to get it smooth. The best way to do this is to pat it (think burping a baby or giving your significant other some "love taps" on the rump; I really can't think of any other way to describe it) and pull the sides down to get a smooth ball-like top.

Then hold the dough with one hand and with your thumb and index finger on the other, squeeze off a ball about 1.5 inches in diameter. Don't twist the dough -- overworking it will make it tough.

This process is kneping. It's something I've done for a long time, but I didn't know it had a name until Marilyn filled me in.

In any case, since mom and I divided the dough, we each made 18 1.5-inch balls (for the base) and 18 slightly smaller ones (for the top). But then our processes differed.

In the Bertha Toevs method of making zweiback, you let the dough rise until doubled, about 30 minutes, before stacking them. My mom wanted to stack them before they rose, as several other recipes suggest, including both Naomi's and Marilyn's. This is how her mother made them as well.

So, my mom stacked the smaller balls on top of the larger base and pressed her finger all the way through to the pan (which should be well greased!) and then let them rise about 30 minutes or so. And I let the dough rise first.

In this method, you dip your finger in a glass of cold water and then poke a hole almost all the way through to the baking sheet. (I wiggled my finger a little to create a slight well for the small ball.) Then, you moisten the bottom of the small ball and press it in the center of well (use slight pressure -- the dough will be very light as it has already risen).

When all the balls have been stacked, preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. When the oven is ready, turn it down to 350 degrees and bake the zweiback for 15 to 20 minutes until they're well browned.

Marilyn says to eat them without butter, only fresh jam. But my husband doesn't like rhubarb (pity that), so when I make them again (and when I get a Kitchen Aid), I'm going to try this recipe for homemade butter.

In case you were wondering, the Bertha Toevs-stacked zweiback had a better survival rate than the other method. Casualties and survivors alike, however, were consumed with great rejoicing at our impromptu faspa.