Author: Daniel Ebneter

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The Power of B: Bernese Butter Braid (Cappuccino on the Foredeck)

“Bärner Ankezüpfe” (Bernese Butter Braid) is an absolutely non-diet Sunday breakfast/brunch classic. It’s named after the canton (state) of Bern, home to the Swiss capital of the same name. Züpfe – or Zopf as it’s called in other parts of the country – has been baked in Switzerland for hundreds of years.

Making Zopf takes time, but the smell and taste of it makes every minute well spent. The recipe yields 2 loafs of approximately 800 g each. It pairs very well with honey and jam.

By the way, in case you wondered, the name is pronounced [BAE-rner AHNG-keh-TSUP-fae] or just [TSO-pf].

Ingredients

  • 1 kg white flour
  • 30 g fresh yeast
  • 1 tsp sugar
  • 5 dl lukewarm milk (max. 35° C / 95° F)
  • 180 g butter
  • 2 tsp salt
  • 2 whole eggs
  • 1 egg yolk
  • for egg wash: 2 egg yolks, 1 pinch of salt

Method

  • Sieve flour into a larger pre-warmed bowl. Create a well at the center.
  • Mix yeast and sugar until liquid. Add a cup of milk and mix thoroughly.
  • Pour mixture into well.
  • Blend with a small quantity of flour with your fingers to obtain a pre-ferment.
  • Cover the bowl with a cloth and leave in a warm place for 20 minutes.
  • In the meantime, melt the butter in the remaining warm milk. Heat temporarily if needed, but make sure temperature drops to under 35° C / 95° F before carrying on.
  • Bury the pre-ferment under flour and sprinkle the salt across the top.
  • Add the butter/milk mix slowly.
  • Knead until no longer sticky (around 10 minutes).
  • Cover again and put back in warm place for 1.5 hours.
  • Remove dough from bowl and divide into four equal parts.
  • Work each part into a strand around 75 cm / 2.5 ft long, with the center slightly thicker than the ends.
  • Braid the two loafs as seen in the first part of this video. (The five-strand braid in the second part is not for beginners…)
  • Place the loafs on a buttered baking sheet and leave to raise for 20 minutes.
  • Generously brush the loafs with the egg wash. Leave in a cool place for 30 minutes while pre-heating the oven to 200° C / 390° F.
  • Bake for 45-50 minutes.

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No Captain’s License if You’re Color-Blind?

I’ve known that I’m color-blind since I took the Ishihara test for the first time as a young adult – and failed very miserably. This has never bothered me and never kept me from doing anything I wanted. Until time came to apply for my German Coastal Waters Captain’s License, Sportbootführerschein SBF See.

When it became clear that there was no way I would pass one of the commonly accepted tests your GP or optician is able to give you, I started looking at my color blindness in more detail. In fact, most of these tests, like Ishihara or the Farnsworth D15 Test, are screening tests. They’re very good at confirming you have normal color vision. But if you happen to have some form of color vision deficiency, like 8% of men and 0.5% of women of European descent, the tests will not typically tell you what type or how severe.

That’s where things got interesting. The SBF medical evaluation form [German] says that if doubts remain after the screening test, an anomaloscope should be used to evaluate the type and severity of your color blindness. The examination with this apparatus yields a numerical value, the “anomalous quotient”, for each of your eyes. Normal color vision translates to values between 0.7 and 1.4. Values under 0.7 indicate “red weakness” (protanomaly), values above 1.4 “green weakness” (deuteranomaly).

Now, the good thing is that the German regulations provide for some headroom on the “green weakness” side. Values between 1.4 and 6.0 – translating to a moderate-to-medium deficiency – are still considered sufficient to pass. (You’re out of luck though if you happen to be on the “red weakness” side with a value under 1.4, unfortunately.)

I came in with values under 4 for both eyes after the examination at the Augenklinik Basel – well below threshold. What a relief! (Remember: I can hardly get an Ishihara plate right.)

My takeaway from this experience is that it’s always worth digging deeper on what the regulations really ask for. I’m quite certain other national regulations also provide that kind of leniency towards persons with “green weakness”, and be it only through license restrictions like being prohibited to navigate alone at night. The anomaloscopy wasn’t cheap, but it kept me from giving up on a dream – what better way to spend money?

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“Burning Love” Snow Omelette (Cappuccino on the Foredeck)

“Burning Love” is a very common European dessert made of vanilla ice cream, hot raspberries and whipped cream. “Snow” or “foam” omelette is an Austrian specialty which gets its name from the whipped egg whites used for it.

In this recipe, we’re combining the two into a delicious dessert, or breakfast if you want to really spoil yourself. It pairs nicely with a cappuccino on the foredeck.

Ingredients

  • 500 g frozen raspberries (or other berries)
  • 2 dl cream
  • caster sugar
  • salt
  • 4 eggs, separated into whites and yolks
  • 2 x 15 g sugar
  • 40 g flour (type 550)
  • 10 g butter

Method

  • Heat berries in a pan with a bit of water and caster sugar to taste. Keep warm.
  • Whip cream with a pinch of salt and caster sugar to taste. Reserve in fridge.
  • Preheat oven to 180° Celsius.
  • Whip egg whites with a pinch of salt and first portion of sugar until solid.
  • Mix egg yolks with second portion of sugar until creamy. The sugar shouldn’t scratch anymore.
  • Carefully incorporate egg whites.
  • Sieve flour over mix. Combine thoroughly but carefully, maintaining the volume.
  • Melt butter in oven-ready pan. Spread across whole surface with a brush.
  • Pour mix into pan.
  • Bake for around 15 minutes until golden brown.
  • Place generous portions in deep plates. Add berries on top or on the side to taste. Decorate with whipped cream.

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Godmother’s Camembert & Ham Quiche

Another recipe from my childhood that has got and kept its name within the family over decades.

I first ate this quiche at my godmother’s home on one of the rather rare occasions I was visiting her near Zurich Airport. She worked as a VIP ground hostess for the former Swiss national airline Swissair, and I dearly remember roaming parts of the airport not usually accessible to ordinary mortals – including running into Peter Ustinov at the VIP lounge at one point.

As for her quiche recipe, much as Squeaky’s Tarte Flambée, it has stayed in my personal cookbook because it’s quick and easy. Combined with a simple green or lamb’s lettuce salad, it makes for an enjoyable light lunch or dinner.

Ingredients

  • 1 rolled-out round dough of 30-32 cm diameter / 250-300 g
  • 150 g ham, in small cubes
  • 150 g Camembert cheese, in bits
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 dl cream
  • 1 dl milk or natural yoghurt
  • salt, pepper, nutmeg

Method

  • Preheat oven to 200° Celsius.
  • Place dough in round baking tin and prick evenly with a fork.
  • Sprinkle with ham cubes and Camembert bits.
  • Mix eggs, cream and milk/yoghurt in a bowl. Season to taste with salt, pepper and nutmeg. Pour.
  • Bake for approximately 35 minutes until dough and filling are nicely coloured.
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Risotto “comme la bouillabaisse”

Risotto was one of the very first dishes my mom taught me to cook. In the 35 years since, I’ve always loved how you can invent a risotto for every taste, every location and every occasion.

Here’s my creation inspired by the most Mediterranean of Mediterranean dishes – the bouillabaisse [BOO-ya-bess; bu.ja.bɛːs] originating from Marseille in southern France.

Ingredients

  • 1 onion or 2 shallots
  • 2 carrots
  • 1 small celery root or 2 branches of celery, or 1/2 : 1 mixed
  • 1 small fennel bulb
    all diced for mirepoix (approximately 3-4 mm)
  • 3 cloves of garlic, halved and cut into very thin slices
  • 1 small leek, cut into julienne (small strips)
  • 3 tomatoes, emptied and diced
  • 3 sprigs flat-leafed parsley
  • 3 sprigs thyme
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 1 piece of orange peel (around 5 x 2 cm)
  • 300 g Carnaroli, Arborio or Vialone rice
  • 2 dl dry white whine
  • 7 dl vegetable stock
  • 5 dl fish or seafood stock
  • 500 g fresh salmon fillet or any other saltwater fish suitable for poaching (ask your fishmonger)
  • 12 scallops (meat only)
  • 12 shrimps (guts removed)
  • olive oil
  • vegetable or peanut oil
  • salt, pepper

Method

  • Heat 3 tbsp olive oil in a large pot.
  • Add mirepoix vegetables and garlic. Braise lightly for 5 minutes.
  • Add leak and rice, braise for another 5 minutes.
  • Add white wine, saffron, bay leaf and orange peel.
  • Increase heat and reduce liquid almost completely.
  • Add 5 dl of the vegetable stock, all fish/seafood stock and herb sprigs. Bring to a simmer. Don’t stir!
  • Place fish on a skimmer (in portions if needed) and poach for 5-10 minutes. Ask your fishmonger for the correct time for the fish you’re buying. For salmon, 5 minutes work well. Set aside.
  • Once the fish removed, continue cooking the risotto until “al dente”. Stir from time to time. Total cooking time from when you added the rice will be around 30 minutes depending on type of rice. If the risotto thickens too much, gradually add some of the leftover vegetable stock.
  • In the meantime, sauté the scallops and shrimps over medium heat in a mixture of olive and other oil.
  • A few minutes before the risotto is finished, remove the herb sprigs, bay leaf and orange peel.
  • Break the poached fish into bite-sized chunks. Carefully mix into the risotto and let heat.
  • Adjust seasoning with salt and pepper.
  • Serve risotto in pre-heated deep plates, with seafood arranged on top and a thyme sprig as garnish.
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Learning About Medicine at Sea

How long has it been since you were last trained in First Aid? When you passed your driver’s license? In the army? For me, it was over 20 years back, so I very much looked forward to refreshing my knowledge and learning about the specific challenges of medicine at sea.

Due to COVID, the course had to be changed from two days onsite to one full day online and a short practical slot onsite which, given the epidemiological situation in Switzerland, is not to take place before February.

Martin Fischle of sailadventures.ch [German] did a fabulous job introducing us to the basics of medicine at sea based on his immense experience as both an ER nurse/instructor and a sailor.

The biggest challenge of medicine at sea is how long it takes until you can put a sick or injured person in the hands of a professional. I had never realized this before although it’s pretty obvious. In large cities, an ambulance may be 10-15 minutes away. Make this an hour in remote areas, and it still doesn’t compare to what you have to deal with on a boat. In one situation Martin described, it took more than five hours before a patient with a heart attack could be loaded into an ambulance. And that was from a boat just off Helgoland, an island near the German coast. One can only imagine what this means for a crew.

Among the many takeaways from the day, these were the most enlightening to me:

  • You may have to go on for hours with cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Even the best trained people can only do this for 15 minutes at a time. So look at the size of the crew and do the math.
  • Pain reduces the effect of life-saving measures, which means pain management is actually one of the most important activities by itself. On this topic, I also finally understood why my doctor brother always recommends combining two or three painkillers. There are three categories, acting at the injured location, on the communication to the brain, or on the brain itself.
  • People can get into serious trouble and die 24-48 hours after you pull them out of the water. Even small amounts of water in the lungs can cause them to get irritated and swell to a point where they will no longer work. Knowing this, one should be extremely attentive to breathing problems after near-drowning incidents, and always have a strong diuretic at hand that will eliminate water from the body quickly.
  • “No-one is dead before they’re warm and dead.” Would you have known that you can kill a person that has remained in cold water for a long time by merely moving them, or warming them up too quickly? In a severely hypothermic patient that doesn’t shiver anymore, pumping cold blood from the extremities into the relatively warmer heart can easily lead to deadly cardiac arrythmia. This means such patients must be handled with extreme care, and not given up on too soon. The lowest core temperature someone survived was 13 degrees Celsius.

I learned so much more in this course than in any first aid training before. Martin’s course is accepted as a Medicine at Sea training for the SYA bluewater license. I can only recommend it.

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Just in: My German/International Inland Waters Captain’s License (SBF Binnen)

Did you know the Swiss “Motorbootführerschein Kategorie A” can be converted into a German/International Inland Waters Captain’s License “SBF Binnen” without an additional exam?

All it takes is sending a physical copy of your Swiss license together with a recent passport photo and an authorization to debit around 35 Euros from your account to the Deutscher Motoryacht Verband DMYV. This is the application form (PDF in German; as of November 2020).

An international certificate is available from the Swiss authorities as well. It comes at a hefty price and has the disadvantage that it’s not valid by itself. You always have to have your Swiss license with you that comes as a bulky piece of paper. The credit card format is so much more convenient.

Looking into the future, my Coastal Waters captain’s license “SBF See” will just be added to line 11 of the card as “CWM <date>” once I pass my exam. There will be no separate license to carry around.

For now, I’m just going enjoy the SBF Binnen giving me access to inland water rentals in 21 countries, with 8 more currently listed as forthcoming.

.

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The Bonnag Trilogy (Cappuccino on the Foredeck)

My job usually involves a lot of business travel which I’ve been direly missing during the pandemic. As a surrogate, I’ve started exploring many parts of the world through Youtube videos of boat trips and maritime expeditions. Most of them don’t fail to talk about local cuisine.

That’s how I came across Bonnag, a buttermilk soda bread originating from the Isle of Man. Luckily enough, a pal of mine grew up there and was able to find me a family recipe. I turned it into three Bonnag variants – just in time for the Cappuccino on the Foredeck last Sunday!

Let’s start by preheating the oven to 190°C.

The dough is made by mixing the following ingredients thoroughly by hand:

  • 1000 g white flour
  • 20 g baking soda
  • 10 g salt
  • 750 ml buttermilk at room temperature

Now split the dough into three equal parts. Use one part for each of the following variants.

Plain Bonnag

  • Incorporate 20 g of white sugar into the dough.
  • Shape into two or three balls and place on baking sheet.
  • Bake for 30-40 minutes until browned. Knock on the bottom of the Bonnags with a knuckle. If you hear a hollow sound, they’re done!

Raisin Bonnag

  • Proceed like for plain Bonnag, but, in addition to the sugar, incorporate a handful of raisins into the dough before shaping.
Plain Bonnag
Raisin Bonnag

Spicy Bonnag

  • Incorporate 1 crushed or finely chopped clove of garlic, 100 g grated cheese (2/3 gruyère and 1/3 parmesan worked well) and 3 tablespoons of chopped herbs (rosemary, thyme, flat-leafed parsley, chervil) into the dough.
  • Shape into one loaf.
  • Bake for 40-50 minutes.

The Spicy Bonnag turned out to be my favorite while the First Mate preferred the plain variant and the Second Mate the one with raisins. So there was one to please every taste!

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The Secret of Squeaky’s Tarte (Flambée)

In the late 2000’s, Swiss television ran a cooking show featuring Sibylle Sager, a lady of exceptional culinary talents with a no less exceptional high-pitched voice. We used to jokingly call her “Squeaky” in the family, and when she presented her interpretation of a tarte flambée one night, we couldn’t help but memorize the recipe under the name of “Squeaky’s Tarte”.

Since then, I must have served Squeaky’s Tarte dozens, if not hundreds of times to family and friends, be it as a light lunch or dinner accompanied by a salad or as a snack with apéritif. While I still like the basic recipe very much, I’ve come to add countless twists to it over time. Enjoy inventing your own!

Ingredients

The Constants

  • 1 ready-made rectangular tarte flambée dough of approximately 25 x 40 cm
  • 150 g crème fraîche
  • 2 large spring onions, finely chopped
  • 250 g cherry tomatoes, quartered

The Crème fraîche seasonings (choose 1 to 3, or more if adventurous)

  • 1 pinch of hot chili powder (I prefer Piment d’Espelette) [original recipe]
  • 125 mg saffron [shown in pictures]
  • 1 tsp of curry [shown in pictures]
  • 1 tbsp fresh herbs like parsley, chives, …, chopped
  • 1 tbsp dill (to combine with salmon topping), chopped

The Toppings (choose 1 to 3, or more if adventurous)

  • 20 black olives [original recipe]
  • 75 g bacon, in small cubes [shown in pictures]
  • 75 g ham, in small cubes [shown in pictures]
  • 100 g pumpkin or carrots, in small cubes
  • 100 g chanterelles or other mushrooms, coarsely chopped
  • * 100 g Munster cheese, in small chunks
  • * 100 g parmesan, shaved
  • * 50 g gorgonzola, in small chunks
  • ** 100 g smoked salmon, in patches
  • ** 50 g arugula

Method

  • Preheat oven to 220° Celsius.
  • Place dough on baking sheet lined with paper.
  • Mix crème fraîche with seasoning thoroughly, spread thinly over the whole surface of the dough.
  • Sprinkle with tomatoes and spring onions. Salt lightly.
  • Add non-starred toppings.
  • Bake for 20 minutes.
  • Add * toppings.
  • Continue baking for approximately 20 minutes until the dough is golden brown.
  • Add ** toppings.
  • Serve immediately.
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Cappuccino on The Foredeck: Scones

It was a silent moment this morning when my First Mate and I realized that we had no fresh bread left for breakfast. Then she grabbed our new copy of 100 Great Breads by Paul Hollywood and flipped through it frantically. “Scones!” One hour later, we sat on our imaginary foredeck with coffee and our freshly baked treats loaded with grandma’s blueberry jam. No clotted cream, unfortunately, but still a really good start into the day!

Makes 12 scones with approximately 250 kcal / 1025 kJ each.

Scone
Scone with blueberry jam

Ingredients

  • 500 g white flour
  • 2 eggs
  • 75 g sugar (preferably caster sugar)
  • 30 g baking powder
  • 75 g butter
  • 225 ml milk
  • 1 egg yolk
  • (optional) 100 g raisins

Method

  • Beat the eggs.
  • Soften the butter with a fork.
  • Mix all ingredients up to milk by hand for 5 minutes.
  • (optional) Incorporate the raisins.
  • Tip on lightly floured surface and roll to 3-4 cm thick.
  • Cut out scones of 5-8 cm diameter.
  • Put on lined baking tray and brush with egg yolk.
  • Leave to sit in the fridge for 30 minutes. In the meantime, preheat your oven to 220° Celsius.
  • Brush with egg yolk again.
  • Bake for 15 minutes.
  • Serve warm.