When thinking of Austria and baked goods in general, there’s a tendency for the mind to jump to the image of involved cakes piled up in many layers… or else rich pastries stuffed with whipped cream or glossy with chocolate icing or fruit glazes, all sourced from fancy city bakeries. But the Austrian baking scene isn’t all like that. In particular, there’s a well-established tradition of cookie and biscuit baking as well, going back centuries.
Many of these recipes reflect their origins in periods when yeast was mostly reserved for breadmaking, and non-yeast leavening agents were expensive and hard for home bakers to find. Some of these cookie and biscuit recipes use pre-baking powder rising agents like hartshorn (ammonium carbonate): others relied on beaten-in air to lighten the final baked product. Still others use yeast-raised doughs (possibly left over from bread-baking), shaped into long thin loaves, partially baked, and then sliced again, producing a result very closely akin to Italian biscotti.
This recipe, from the region around the little city of Graz in eastern Austria, is a typical variant on the second type. Grazer zwieback is a very light and toothsome cookie or biscuit based primarily on egg white and confectioners’ sugar/icing sugar, with just enough flour stirred into the mixture to help it hold together when it bakes, and a little vanilla sugar for flavoring.
Baking this mixture produces a modestly risen cake with a very delicate flavor. But the story doesn’t stop there. After the cake’s completely cooled, it’s sliced thin, the slices laid out on a baking sheet and dusted with powdered sugar again, and then rebaked just long enough to dry them out completely and add just a little bit of color around the edges. The final result is a beautifully crunchy and delicately flavored confection that is very hard to stop eating once you start.
The texture of Grazer zwieback is slightly reminiscent of that of the Italian biscotti: and the two names have the same meaning, “twice baked”. They’re also known as Kinderzwieback, “Children’s Zwieback“, the idea possibly being that these are the kind of cookies that—maybe due to the sugar—might be given to a good child as a reward.
There’s no denying that some versions of Kinderzwieback (like the one that the Austrian food blogger Zartgrau describes here) are absolutely rolled in sugar. I think, though, that our recipe’s version of the Grazer goodie is entirely worth giving to an adult who wants something delicate to savor while sitting back with their coffee or tea. And if you like, you can also omit the dusting of powdered sugar and produce a biscuit that goes surprisingly well with a cool white wine. (Which probably shouldn’t be a surprise, considering where these come from. Graz, as capital of the Austrian state of Styria, lies in the midst of some very choice wine country.)
It’s worth noting in passing that this particular delicacy, due perhaps to changing tastes or a tightening market, is getting harder to find even on its home turf. Zartgrau notes in the post linked to above that commercial zwieback products (in the Austrian market anyway) seem in recent years to have been reduced to the more pedestrian “plain” types that are mostly reminiscent of Melba toast. (This company, for example, once did both but now does so no more.) And the company in Graz that once produced enough Grazer zwieback to merit advertising signs like this one recently sold at auction seems to have vanished long ago.
At least we still have a recipe to attempt at home. Ours has been adapted slightly from the one appearing in Gretel Beer’s Classic Austrian Cooking to add a couple of ingredients that help stabilize the beaten egg white and allow the first-stage cake to achieve a little more rise.
This recipe makes a dozen or more Grazer zwieback (depending on how thinly you manage to slice them).
Ingredients:
To start:
Butter and flour an oblong cake tin or pan measuring about 11 inches by 7. (Or a tall-sided loaf pan will do as well. Having done this recipe a few times now, I prefer the latter approach, as it produces a more breadish-looking first stage result. The one I used on this bake was a 24.5cm by 14cm / 9.5inch by 5.5 inch Emile Henry ceramic loaf baker.) …Please note that this is one of those recipes in which, if the baked result can get stuck, it will get stuck… so as insurance, once you’ve buttered and floured the pan proper, you might like to add, inside the pan, a “sling” of greased baking paper that sticks up above either of the long sides. This way, if the first stage of the bake gets recalcitrant, you’ll have a way to pull the cake out of the pan without damaging it.
Melt the butter in the microwave in a heatproof and microwave-safe container and put it aside to cool. (It should be still liquid when you start mixing the ingredients together, but not warm.)
Mix very well together the flour, baking powder, pinch of salt, and vanilla sugar, and set aside until you’re ready for them.
Now add the cream of tartar to the egg whites and whip them until stiff. Slowly and carefully, so as not to reduce the amount of air trapped in the egg whites, whisk in the icing sugar/confectioners’ sugar; then sift in the already-prepared dry ingredients and stir in gently until well combined.
Finally, add the melted (but not warm) butter and stir in, combining well.
Carefully spoon the batter into the prepared baking pan and smooth the top.
Preheat the oven to 340° F / 170° C. When the oven’s ready, place the cake pan carefully inside (handling it gently so as not to knock any of the air bubbles out of the batter) and bake for about fifty minutes, or until set and golden brown. (If you have a fan oven, you may want to set it about 10 degrees lower.)
When baked, remove the cake from the oven, turn it out carefully onto a cake rack, and allow to cool completely — overnight is best.
It’ll look like this: not very prepossessing at this stage, granted.
The next day, cut it into slices about 7-10mm 5/16 inch thick. (Some recipes suggest you try to cut as thinly as 2-3 mm, but I found that hilariously aspirational and just not possible with a cake that was still a little soft and wobbly.) The thickness below was about the best I could manage with a very sharp knife.
Arrange the slices on a baking sheet and dust lightly with icing sugar/confectioner’s sugar. (Omit the sugar if you’re planning to use these as a wine cracker, or just don’t feel like more sugar is necessary.)
Preheat the oven to 375° F / 170° C, and when ready, place the cookie sheet in the oven and bake for approximately ten minutes. Then turn off the heat, crack the door, and allow the oven to cool. Don’t be surprised if these have taken very little color during this process: that’s expected.
When the cookies/biscuits are cool, check them for crispness by attempting to snap one in two. If it doesn’t snap crisply, but instead tries to bend, reheat the oven to the temperatures above and repeat the bake-for-ten-minutes-and-turn off-the-heat step. That should sort the problem out. (But keep an eye on them if you decide to do this third bake. They can go too brown, or even scorch, very abruptly.)
Either way, when they’re crisp enough, you can let them finish cooling on a rack, and then dust them (if you like) with a little more powdered sugar. (I didn’t bother dusting ours. They seemed fine to me just as they were.)
Until you’re ready to eat the zwieback, store them in an airtight tin. Serve with coffee or tea, or wine. …And if your tastes run to biscuit-dunking, beware: once you’ve dunked these, you have about two seconds to get them into your mouth before their own weight makes them come undone and fall into your cup. So don’t say I didn’t warn you.
