This recipe is from week 17 of my food blog, Travel by Stove. I am attempting to cook one meal from every nation on Earth, and Austria is my 17th stop. Filet mit Äpfeln is a simple beef tenderloin served over pan fried apples and a potato cake, topped with mushrooms.
By “Rostbraten”, an Austrian means a thinly sliced sirloin steak which is slightly pounded, seasoned and quickly fried in hot oil. It is always served with a pan gravy. This basic application serves many recipes, of which the one topped with crispy fried onions is the most popular.
On the recipe that I found in my grandmothers recipe box, it says every restaurant in Vienna serves Tafelspitz.
My adaptation of Huey’s Weiner Schnitzel with a Proper Potato Salad. It is the homemade mayonnaise that makes this potato salad particularly delicious – or as Huey described it “proper” – and making it in a food processor couldn’t be easier, although it could, of course, also be made by hand. Huey opts for vegetable oil here rather than olive oil as he insists that it can more effectively be flavoured with other ingredients such as herbs and garlic. The bacon he panfries in olive oil and then adds to the hot potatoes which readily absorb the bacon juices. The leftover eggwash he suggests saving and later adding to some extra eggs to make scrambled eggs. To avoid getting lumps in the breadcrumbs, he suggests using one hand for dipping each schnitzel in the flour and egg and the other hand for dipping the floured, egged schnitzel into the breadcrumbs. If you want to enjoy the potato salad at its most flavoursome, it is essential that it NOT be placed in the fridge but that it is made and eaten on the same day.
Signature dish of the Restaurant Franziskanerplatz in Vienna, Austria. Recipe from a clipping in my grandmother’s recipe box. The recipe recommends grilling the tenderloins to just rare but you don’t have to.
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