Actually, the story of the liver dumplings is more of a nightmare scenario than a tragedy, but at least there is a moral! And a happy ending! (Here is the second part of the story) But let me start with the beginning:
Who knows not the lore
Of the Elements four,
Their resources
And forces,
Will fail with disaster.
Their Spirits to master !
— Goethe, The first Part of the Tragedy of Faust
In the beginning, there was a quick visit at the supermarket, just to grab one or two groceries quickly.
Then it had happened to me:
I saw a kilogram of beef liver on offer.
Actually I hate liver. But Leberknödel (Austrian liver dumplings) I love, and I wanted to make beef soup to go with it anyway. So I dragged home the kilo, happily like a squirrel that has found a cashew nut.
Maybe I should have thought about it:
Who needs a ton of liver, when he actually does not like liver and has only a small freezer?
Who the heck cooks tons of dumplings when he actually has no time for it? (To remember, the visit at the supermarket has been described as "quickly").
Who wants to take care of mountains of bloody liver mass, if he has no meat grinder?
Furthermore, I did not have the original recipe from my grandma at hand, but only took some random recipe from the net.
Nevertheless, I continued with the preparation:
[ingredients title="Ingredients"]
- The exact amount of the ingredients of the first cooking attempt will not be published for security reasons
[/ingredients]
In any case I have made the following mistakes, of which I want to warn you urgently:
If one does not have a meat grinder, but still wants to have something minced, the net advices one to use a hand blender or blender instead. Unluckily, with a blender, the liver mass becomes a bit too runny, and on the other hand small liver pieces can be left uncut. These pieces must be blended too, otherwise parts of the dumplings must be chewed like they were made of rubber (waaaah).
Because the mass was pretty runny, I added ways too much bread crumbs and rolls.
Tipp: If you handle tons of bloody liver mass, prepare everything else beforehand. Believe me.
At the end the dumplings have then tasted just like NOTHING! Tons of boring dumplings who wanted to destroy the blender and did not help to clean up! And then they tasted like nothing.
And the moral?
The happy ending?
Follows in the second blog post.
[…] my last posting about Viennese Leberknödel (Liver Dumplings) I learned that good preparation and the right tools can be really important […]