JUST AS JUICY AS THE ORIGINAL

Vegan Elises from the organic bakery

Create a juicy vegan Elisenlebkuchen, which is in no way inferior to the traditional - the organic bakery Postler from Burgebrach has taken on this challenge and more than successfully mastered it!

We were allowed to look over the shoulder of the hardworking bakers and accompany the production of our juicy Elisen from start to finish.

It smells wonderful when you enter the bakery. Diligent work is going on everywhere: Ingredients are weighed, dough is kneaded, bread, rolls and other fine pastries are shaped into the desired form with practiced nimble hand movements. This is what real bakery work looks like! You would like to stop and discover all the time, but we have a very specific goal: Together with the master baker, we navigate purposefully to a large metal kneading machine. Next to it are already several large containers with the ingredients weighed out. And when we say "large", we mean large! Because here a good 90kg of dough is mixed, from which about 1000 wafer Lebkuchen are made.

And off we went: sugar, marzipan, candied orange peel and candied lemon peel are the first to land in the bowl. They form, together with water, which is added little by little, the "wet base". As dry ingredients join then nuts (cashew, almond and hazelnuts), a small amount of flour (of course <10%, otherwise it would be no waschechechte Elise!) and soy flour as an egg substitute (so to bind the dough) to it. Of course, what must not be forgotten - as probably the most important ingredient of any Lebkuchen - is the characteristic (secret) Lebkuchen-Spice-Mix. All these ingredients are now mixed vigorously, adding a little water as needed, until the perfect consistency is achieved.

After that, it's time for the dough to rest. After an hour's rest, the process continues with the addition of cream of tartar baking powder and ammonium - after all, the dough should also rise during baking.

Once again, the dough is stirred thoroughly and then divided into two buckets (or rather vats) and taken to station number 2, where the dough is portioned onto wafers and then spread onto baking trays.

Now, different paths are taken depending on which of our Elisen varieties it will be:

All Elises that do not receive a chocolate coating are given a completely different special treatment: for each Elise, four hand-picked, whole almonds are pressed into the still raw dough - as Elises' crowning glory, so to speak. Then they go into the oven. Some of these crowned Elises await an extra sweet treat in the form of a sugar glaze after cooling. For this, fondant is stirred liquid in a bowl and applied individually to the chosen ones with a brush and by hand.

With the Elisen, which receive a chocolate coating with dark, milk or white chocolate, it runs exactly the other way around. Here it is first bake, bake Lebkuchen and then or after the subsequent cooling comes the special treatment of chocolate. Before their grand appearance, however, they are quickly put into the cooling chamber for a few minutes - extra cool, so to speak. Temperature plays an important role in this production step. This also applies to the chocolate itself, because the cocoa butter it contains has to remain homogeneous and liquid throughout the entire process. The gingerbread now "travels" down the "chocolate road" on a kind of treadmill. The layer should not be too thick or too thin at the end - after all, the gingerbread flavor should remain in focus. This is achieved by blowing off a part of the applied chocolate layer directly.

Once all the Elises are ready and dried, the only thing missing is the matching packaging, but that's another story;)