Spätzle

I first ate spätzle in Austria, at 7 Stern Brau. There, I decided two things: I would cook it when I got home, and I would accept the anglicised spelling "spaetzle". It's just less fiddly to type. Sorry Austria.Anyway, kaese spaetzle is the classic - little baked noodle thingies slavered with melted cheese and bacon, crispy fried onions scattered over the top. It's bliss. Both as comfort food and a path to coronary heart disease, it shits all over macaroni cheese.But with that (and a recent light-hearted ticking off for the amount of cheese I eat) ringing in my ears, I thought I'd try something lighter. Spaetzle will slot into a good majority of the recipes I've seen for gnocchi or pasta. So why not a light fresh tomato sauce?Well, because I've a short but sticky history of fucking up spaetzle, that's why.

Initial attempts

I'd now made spaetzle twice since returning from Austria - once for kaese spaetzle, and once with a hastily improvised sauce of leftover pork mince, fennel seeds and tomato. Although neither was exactly a disaster, neither quite worked.The first was the full horror of sticky cookware, confusion, colanders, and eight thousand hours of washing up. Smitten Kitchen has been through it, and my experience was broadly similar. In essence, it's hard to get the consistency right, which means it's hard to get the exact process right. Too solid and you can't drip through a colander, too thin and you get joyless watery strands, or worse an enormous clump.Using the ricer left my kitchen looking like the aftermath of a drive-by bukkake incident.On attempt two, I bought a hobel or spaetzle grater. Well, I say that - it was two pounds in the clearance sale of a cookware store, and at less than the price of a pint, why the fuck not. It helped massively, but my batter was too thin, so the resulting spaetzle were too thin, too. Joyless. It had a watery edge, too, I think from too long boiling. But fine, that's the equipment, now consistency.Opinions seem to differ widely about flour and egg quantities. In the first two batches, I used one egg per hundred grams of flour, with milk to let out. I appreciate that the milk itself is quasi-heretical, but hey - Smitten Kitchen does it, and I do think the batter needs thinning a little. Just not as much as the last time I tried. I guess it needs to be thick enough that moving the hopper of the grater actually makes some difference, dolloping it through slowly.So for round three, I barely thinned at all. I also upped the egg, in the hope that it would add bite and combat the watery edge. It did.My verdict: 2 eggs : 100g

Ingredients:

Spaetzle:

• Eggs (two per hundred grams of flour)
• Plain flour (a hundred grams per one and a bit people. Ratios: fuck yeah)
• Milk, but not much

Sauce:

• Tomatoes
• Onions
• Aubergine
• Merguez sausages
• Oregano
• Paprika
• Garlic

Instructions:

Quickly, the sauce: it's just the things on the ingredients list, chopped and roasted. Cut the vegetables (except garlic) into chunks, and put them into the oven with the sausages. It's basically my merguez sausage pasta recipe. It'll all cook down into a rough sauce over the course of about thirty minutes. then you add the garlic and crank up the heat for a few minutes to reduce a bit.There are better sauces to put on spaetzle, and probably the best thing is just a load of cheese and bacon.For the spaetzle itself, you also just mix the things that are in it.Work the flour and eggs together with a whisk. It'll be thick and clumpy, and that's very nearly what you want. Add milk, a little at a time, until you've got a very thick mess that's somewhere between a dough and a batter. It should be only just recognizable as a liquid - sticky, stretchy, and able to be poured, but only with severe reluctance.Get a pan of water to the boil.Pour/scrape/coerce the batter into the grater, or a wide-gauge colander if that's what you're working with. Drip the mix slowly into the water, either by moving the hopper of the grater, or by stirring round the colander with a spatula. Or possibly witchcraft. Seriously, I don't know how you do this well without a grater.Stirring the water a little should stop it clumping together or sticking if you're making a large batch, but I've not had much of a problem just doing a whole load at once. You can make small batches and strain them out if you like, but I couldn't find my slotted spoon. Really - this was shambolic.Like gnocchi, the spaetzle will float when they're pretty much done, and don't take more than a minute or two to cook. Strain them out, and toss them in a little oil before serving.I worked them straight through the sauce, and put it all back into the oven for a minute, but lots of people like to fry them quickly in butter with herbs.That's basically it - make a batter, drip it into water, put it in sauce, enjoy little nuggets of squishy carb-y joy.They're tasty and comforting, and texturally somewhere between pasta and gnocchi. They're less hassle to make fresh than either of those things, too. Spaetzle should have a bit of bite, and a slightly rich taste, so if you want to experiment, you could up the egg even further, or add some flavours. I did actually use a handful of fine-chopped parsley in these, but it didn't do much. Oregano or crushed garlic might work well.But mainly - and I implore you here - ignore the voices of dietary reason, and just cover your spaetzle with cheese.