Recipe for Traditional Alsatian Baeckeoffe

Baeckeoffe is a traditional Alsatian dish, which takes more than 24 hours to prepare.

It is a dish based on potatoes, meat and mixed vegetables, cooked for a long time with spices and white wine. The word Baeckeoffe means "baker's oven", which means that it was a city dish, a Sunday dish.

In the countryside, bakers were rare, as each farmer usually baked his own bread once a fortnight or every three weeks (which gave him the opportunity to prepare the Flammeküech).

Meat was also inaccessible to the poorest, who ate potatoes with thin white cheese (bibeleskaas) during the week and eggs in white sauce (kachelmües) on Sundays, a luxury day.

Other sources mention a Monday dish. On Mondays, the housewife would leave her Baeckeoffe at the baker's before doing her laundry at the washhouse and would pick it up when she had finished.

The three meats used represented the religious traditions in Alsace: beef for the Catholics, pork for the Protestants and lamb for the Jewish religion, which was very present in Alsace.

Preparation time: 20 minutes

Cooking time: 120 minutes

Ingredients (for 8 people):

• 1 earthenware terrine with lid
• 1.5 kg of potatoes
• 1 kg pork loin
• 500 g boneless mutton shoulder
• 500 g beef heel
• 1 pig's trotter (optional)
• 2 onions
• 3 carrots
• 1 leek
• 100 g flour (to seal the lid of the Baeckeoffe pan)
• salt and pepper

For the marinade :

• 75 cl dry white wine from Alsace (Riesling or Sylvaner)
• 1 chopped onion
• 1 crushed garlic clove
• sprigs of thyme
• 2 bay leaves
• peppercorns

Preparation:

Cut the pork loin, mutton shoulder and beef leg into 5 cm cubes and refrigerate for 24 hours in a large dish with the marinade ingredients.

Peel the potatoes and carrots and cut them into very thin slices.

Chop the onions, drain the 3 meats and reserve the juice from the marinade.

In the buttered terrine, place successively: 1 layer of onions, 1 layer of potatoes and carrots, the pieces of meat, the pork trotter split in 2, 1 layer of potatoes and carrots, the leek. Don't forget to add salt and pepper between each layer.

Pour the juice from the marinade down to the level of the potatoes, then put the lid on and seal it with a cord of pastry made with flour and 1 tbsp. water.

Bake in a hot oven (200°C / thermostat 6/7) for about 2 to 2? hours.

You can enjoy this dish with a good Riesling, Bon Appétit !