Apfelküchle

Method

1. Whisk the flour, sugar, vanilla sugar, and salt together. Whisk in the milk and the egg yolks until completely smooth, then the rum. Cover and rest it 20 minutes. This is not optional: unrested batter is grainy and slides off the apple.
2. Make the Vanillesoße while the batter rests. Bring the milk, cream, and split vanilla pod to a bare simmer, take the pan off the heat, and leave it 10 minutes to infuse. Whisk the yolks with the sugar, cornstarch, and a pinch of salt. Pour a ladle of the hot milk into the yolks while whisking, return everything to the pan, and stir over low heat until it coats a spoon. Keep it under 80°C. Above that the yolks scramble and no amount of whisking brings it back. Fish out the pod and keep it warm.
3. Mix the sugar and cinnamon on a wide plate.
4. Peel the apples, push the core out of each with an apple corer, and slice them across into rings 8 mm thick. Thinner and they disappear into the batter; thicker and the middle is still raw when the shell is done. Toss the rings with the lemon juice and pat them dry on a tea towel. Wet apple sheds its batter in the fat.
5. Pour the oil into the skillet to a depth of 2 cm and heat it to 170°C. Without a thermometer: a cube of white bread should brown in about 50 seconds. Below 160°C the fritters drink oil and go heavy; above 180°C the shell browns before the apple softens.
6. Beat the egg whites to a soft peak and fold them into the batter in two additions. Use it within a few minutes. The batter should coat a ring thickly and fall from the spoon in a slow ribbon. If it runs off, whisk in another 20 g of flour.
7. Drop the rings into the batter, lift each one out on a fork, let the excess run off for two seconds, and slide it into the fat away from you. Fry three or four at a time, no more. Crowding drops the oil temperature and every fritter after that is greasy.
8. Fry 2 to 3 minutes a side. Turn them when the underside is the colour of a dark honey and the edges have set and blistered. They are done when both sides are evenly deep gold and a skewer meets no resistance in the apple.
9. Lift them onto kitchen paper for 15 seconds, then straight into the cinnamon sugar and turn them over in it. Do it while they are steaming hot; the sugar has to melt slightly onto the crust to stick. Cold fritters just shed it.
10. Serve immediately with the warm Vanillesoße. They are at their best about a minute out of the pan and they are noticeably worse after ten.

Notes

• The batter: which one and why. German home recipes overwhelmingly use a plain milk, egg, and flour pancake batter, thick, rested, and that is what this is. Beer batter is the Gasthaus version: replace 60 ml of the milk with 60 ml of a Weizen or a Pils and you get a crisper, drier, slightly savoury shell that holds longer on the plate, which is exactly what a restaurant needs and exactly what a home cook does not. A yeasted batter also exists in older German Backbücher, 200 g flour with 10 g fresh yeast and 200 ml warm milk left to proof 45 minutes, and it puffs into something closer to a doughnut around the apple. I fold beaten whites into the milk batter instead. It gets most of the lift of the yeasted version with none of the waiting, and it is the compromise several German sources have arrived at independently.
• Boskop, and why a soft apple fails. Boskop is the standard answer in Germany and it is the right one. It is sharply acidic, the flesh is dense and low in water, and it holds a ring shape at 170°C long enough for the shell to set. A soft sweet apple, Gala, Golden Delicious, Red Delicious, does two things wrong: it collapses into sauce inside the batter so the ring turns hollow, and it releases steam and juice that push the batter off the fruit from inside, which is what makes a fritter split and spit. Boskop can be hard to find outside Germany. In Canada, use Northern Spy, Ida Red, Cortland, or a firm Granny Smith. Elstar, Jonagold, Braeburn, and Cox Orange all work in Germany.
• Frying oil is a fixed quantity, not a scaled one. You need 2 cm of depth in whatever pan you use, which is about 700 ml in a 26 cm skillet, and that number does not change whether you fry four rings or twenty. Sunflower or rapeseed oil is what most German kitchens use. Butterschmalz is the traditional fat and tastes better, but it is expensive at this volume; a 50:50 mix of oil and Butterschmalz is a reasonable middle. Do not use olive oil or plain butter, both of which burn well below 170°C.
• The skillet is the constraint. Doubling the batter does not mean a bigger pan, it means more batches. Hold finished fritters on a rack in a 90°C oven, never on a plate, and never covered. Ten minutes is the limit before the crust gives up.
• Strain the used oil through a coffee filter while it is warm, keep it in a jar in the dark, and it is good for one more round of frying. Anything past that smells of old apple.
• The Vanillesoße keeps two days. Press cling film onto the surface so it does not skin and rewarm it gently while stirring, without letting it boil.
• Ofenschlupfer is already on the site and these two are the same apple and cinnamon family, one baked and slow, one fried and fast. Both want the same tart, firm apple, and both want Vanillesoße. If you have a glut of Boskop in October, make the Küchle the day you buy them and the Ofenschlupfer the day the Weckle go stale.

Sources used

• Brotwein: Apfelküchle Rezept, einfach wie von Oma
• Simply Yummy: Omas Apfelküchle
• Gutekueche.de: Apfelküchle
• Tress Brüder: Apfelküchle mit Vanillesoße, aus Simon Tress, Echt Schwäbisch
• Bake to the Roots: Apple Fritters, schwäbische Apfelküchle mit Vanillesoße
• Kerrygold: Apfelküchle im Bierteig mit Vanillesoße