Røget Rullepølse

Røget Rullepølse ("smoked rolled sausage") is a Danish speciality I sometimes ask people to bring me when I have visitors from the home country. I love it, but I've never even contemplated making it..

Basically pieces of meat (usually pork) are boiled, rolled with herbs and spices, pressed and smoked. Simple, no? Honestly, I don't even know the details. What I know is that good butcher shops usually have this delicacy (but forget about the cheap stuff you find in supermarkets all over Denmark).

Anchovy Pizza

Pizza with tomato sauce, red onion, canned anchovies, capers and mozzarella - no extra salt needed. The irony (considering how close to Italy we are) is that the pizza dough we bought in the store here isn't as good as the ones we used to buy in Trader Joe's...

Coop Beer

As it turns out, the supermarket chain Coop sells a few beers that you won't find anywhere else, so I thought I'd give them a post here.

Interestingly, we see here an example of something I alluded to earlier: While Prix Garantie Coop is cheaper than Tell (0.60 CHF vs. 0.90 CHF per 0.5 L can) the former actually has a lot more taste than the latter. In fact, while Tell was a disappointment, Prix Garantie Coop was better than I expected - nothing fantastic, but certainly decent at the price.


The most interesting of the pack however is the Bio Bier - an organic beer made for Coop by Brauerei K. Locher in Appenzell, Switzerland. The can says it is unfiltered and the beer is slightly hazy (although nothing like a good hefeweizen). And at 1.50 CHF for a 0.5 L can you can't even fault it for being more expensive than other (non-organic) beers of similar quality.

White Corn Tortillas

Not too long ago I made my first home-made flour tortillas, but of course I also had to try to make corn tortillas. Fortunately I found a store that sells corn flour suitable for this purpose.

Ingredients:
- 2.5 dL (1 cup) water
- 2-2.5 dL (ca. 1 cup) white corn flour
- pinch of salt

The water was placed in a bowl together with the salt. The corn flour was added little by little while stirring with a spoon. The recipe on the pack recommended a 2.5:2 ratio of water:flour but I found that it needed a little more flour in order not to be too sticky. In the end the dough was kneaded by hand for 1-2 minutes and shaped into 8 little balls.

The recipe called for a tortilla press, but since I'm against the owning of too many unitaskers I do not have a tortilla press. I do however have two wooden cutting boards and kitchen wrap. The dough balls were placed one at the time between the cutting boards (each protected with a piece of wrap) and flattened by pressing. When the top board was removed the pressed dough would stick to one of the pieces of wrap, and it could be carefully transferred to a hand by lifting and turning the wrap over the hand so the dough lets go of the wrap by the assistance of gravity (trying to lift the dough off of the wrap still lying on the table was very unsuccessful). The dough was flipped onto a hot (maximum setting on my stove), non-greased pan and turned over a couple of times until the tortilla puffed up (indicating the right amount of water had evaporated). The tortillas were stacked (which kept them nicely warm until eating time) while cooking them one at the time.

They were perhaps a little thick, but I think they turned out quite well anyway.
Served with red beans and guacamole.

Update: Now that I've made them several times, I should add here that they do not always puff up, so one should keep an eye on how 'done' they look as well.

Also, as mentioned above they are relatively thick, which I think goes at least part of the way towards explaining why they are somewhat stiffer (tending to break if one tries to roll them too tightly). The stiffness gets a little worse upon storing and re-heating, but other than that storing and re-heating works fine.