So I just got back from Vienna, a city known for their baked goods and to try as many as I possibly could. I was ordering like four and five different pastries and cakes at every meal that I went to appalling all of the servers across the city. Now one of the most iconic desserts of Vienna is the decadently chocolate sachertorte, and I went to several of the most famous places that serve this so I could try them, and I wanted to compare them to this 19th century recipe for sachertorte from one of Austria's first cookbooks. So thank you to Trade coffee for sponsoring this video as I explore the contentious history of sachertorte this time on Tasting History. So I went to Vienna not knowing if they're truly was an historic recipe for sachertorte because most of the recipes that you can find online that claim to be the original recipe are actually from around the 1950s and they
use modern measurements and temperatures but as I strolled down the streets of Vienna I happened
upon an antique bookstore, and lo and behold they had an early edition of what is considered one of the first Austrian cookbooks, Katharina Prato's 'Sûddeutsche Küche' or South German cooking which was first published in 1857, and by the 1897 edition, that one back there, there was a recipe for sachertorte and fortunately
the night that I got that book I happened to be having dinner with some viewers of the show who knew German and so they were able to help me translate and decipher the old German script known as Fraktur which said "You wet 150 grams of ground vanilla chocolate with a tablespoon of water and let it get soft in the oven. Stir it smooth, add 150 grams butter and stir it in, 6 egg yolks and 150 grams of sugar and beat until fluffy. Beat 6 egg whites until they are like snow and then fold in 150 grams flour. Put the batter into a wide, round spring form pan lined with paper and bake with medium heat. When it is baked, turn it upside down and spread apricot jam and pour 70 grams melted chocolate over it." Now as with most 19th century cakes this one does not have any chemical leavener like baking
powder, and it can make for a rather dense and dry cake and the sachertorte is notoriously dense and dry
and so it's usually served with a nice cup of coffee so I'm going to be drinking a nice cup of coffee from today's sponsor Trade. I love getting coffee from Trade partly because of the amount of coffee available. It's a coffee smorgasbord is what it is. Over 450 different coffees from small roasters all across the country. Now that much choice may sound daunting but when you start up with trade you let them know what your tastes are, what you like in a coffee, the robustness that you prefer and then they curate a feed of coffees having them sent to your door within 48 hours of roasting so they're always fresh like this Power and Glory blend from Feast. Now it has the nutty sweetness that I enjoy in a coffee but it also has a hint of citrus which I often steer clear of because I can find it overpowering, but this is a really nice medium blend and so they
complement each other very well, and it ends up being the perfect cup. So to give Trade a try visit drinktrade.com/maxmiller, and you can get a free bag of coffee sent when you sign up with any subscription from Trade. They are customizable subscriptions and you can cancel at any time, so give them a try, drinktrade.com/maxmiller and they'll send you some coffee to drink with your
sachertorte for which you will need: 10 1/2 tablespoons or 150 g of bittersweet chocolate broken into pieces, and you want something at least 60% cacao for this. 2 teaspoons of vanilla, 10 1/2 tablespoons or 150 grams of unsalted butter, a 1/1 teaspoon of salt, 3/4 of a cup or 150 grams of sugar, 6 egg yolks, 6 egg whites and 1 and 1/4 cup or 150 grams of sifted flour. You'll also need plenty of apricot jam, about a cup. And when it comes to the chocolate glaze on top she says to use 70 grams but then also says to reference a different recipe in the book which calls for a lot more than 70 grams, and you're going to want more because you just always want more in something like this, so for that what you'll need is 80 grams of chocolate and 3/4 of a cup or 150 grams of sugar. So to make the cake she says to soften the chocolate in
the oven and while you could probably do that it is going to be a lot easier to do it on the stove. So to do that heat a pot of water to a boil and then set the chocolate in a bowl over the water, and stir it a bit as it starts to melt. Once it's entirely melted set it aside and let it cool for a few minutes and then add in the butter and beat it until fully smooth. Then add in the egg yolks and again beat until fully combined. Also, while I was in Vienna somebody who was working on their English asked me if it is pronounced yolks [yokes] or yoLks, and I thought I knew but then I was like wait how do I say that? Yokes, yoLks. Yokes, yoLks. Ketchup, catsup. Ketchup, catsup. In the end I was of no help to this person because I realized I actually say it both ways just- I don't know depending on my mood. How do you say it? Either way once the yolks or yolks are completely mixed
in add in the salt and the vanilla, and mix it together and then start adding in the sugar
about a third at a time, and mix for 4 or 5 minutes until everything is smooth and light. In a separate bowl add the egg whites and begin to whisk. These we want to get nice and fluffy with fairly stiff peaks. This is really the only leavener this cake has, it's the air that is trapped inside of those egg whites so we want to nice and fluffy. Once they're fully fluffed begin to add them just a bit at a time to the batter and gently fold them in. Keep folding until there are almost no streaks remaining but do so gently as to not knock out all of the air. Finally add in the flour about a third at a time and fold it in until there is no more white from either the egg or the flour visible. Then immediately pour the batter into a 9 inch spring form pan that's been lined with parchment paper and smooth the top and then set it in the oven at 350° Fahrenheit 175° Celsius for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes remove the cake and let it cool in the pan for 10 minutes. Then remove the springform ring and turn the cake over to let it cool completely while you prepare the apricot jam and the chocolate glaze. Now both of these you want nice and smooth. One is easier to make than the other. For the apricot jam you make it nice and smooth by heating it up a bit on the stove and then passing it through a sieve and then just let it cool down and you're done. When it comes to the chocolate glaze it's definitely
harder especially the way that Katharina Prato has you do it. It's a technique that's really not used all that much anymore these days, exactly the way that she's doing it but it will work pretty much. You start by melting the 80 grams of chocolate just like before then mix 150 grams of sugar with 1/2 cup of water and bring it to a simmer. Then add in that melted chocolate. Now at first it's
going to separate and look rather disappointing, but continue to stir over a medium low heat for 5
minutes or so and it will eventually become smooth. The important thing is to not let it boil too much. Now while it heats slice the cake into two pieces and spread half of the apricot jam on one side then set the other piece of cake on top and spread the rest of the jam on top of the cake. Then as soon as the chocolate glaze has come together pour it over the cake letting it drip down the sides. One this is why you definitely want more chocolate than she suggests because you just- half of it ends up not on the cake- not half of it but a bunch of it doesn't so just always have
more chocolate than you think you need. Also chocolate has always been my Achilles heel. I am
not great with it so I got it to look pretty good, not stellar but it should taste really nice. Now while this is one of the first recipes for sachertorte it is not the original sachertorte, and there's a lot of controversy as to what is the original sachertorte, a controversy that escalated all the way to the Austrian Supreme Court. The legend of the sachertorte begins In 1832. A 16-year-old Franz Sacher has just begun his second year as an apprentice to the head chef in the kitchens of Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich. Now von Metternich was kind of a big deal. I feel with a name like Klemens Wenzel von Metternich you have to be kind of a big deal. He was the Chancellor of the Austrian Empire under
the Hapsburgs and had gained notoriety as the architect and Chairman of the Congress of Vienna where the future of Europe was decided following the fall of Napoleon. So In 1832 when he was at his home entertaining some distinguished guests he wanted to show off with a prized dessert, something
new something unique and so he went to his Chef to ask but it turns out that the chef was sick
that night or so the story goes, and so instead he turned to the 16-year-old in the kitchen Franz Sacher and said make me something fantastic, and the story goes that he cornered the boy and said you
better not disgrace me tonight... so the pressure was on but being so young Franz Sacher hadn't had the experience to make the opulent cakes that were so popular amongst the wealthy in Europe at the time, so instead he opted for substance over style, and made a decadent but simple chocolate cake with
an apricot filling, and a beautiful chocolate glaze on top thus born was the sachertorte. Well of course for the sake of the story the cake was a hit. Its simplicity a breath of fresh air amongst the aristocracy, and not only did the prince love it but it became a popular cake and so Franz Sacher was able to get jobs in the best houses of Budapest and Bratislava before finally returning to Vienna to work at one of the first pastry shops in Vienna. Now as time went on his son Eduard who also worked at this pastry shop decided to strike out on his own and in 1865 he opened
a cafe right next to what would be the Vienna State Opera. And the guests of the future Vienna State Opera would be rather hungry, and so would go to buy cake at Cafe Sacher. It's also around this time that Eduard Sacher probably started sharing the story of how his father invented this now famous
cake because as it turns out Franz Sacher never shared the story himself because it probably wasn't true but that didn't stop Eduard and it was a good story. And regardless of its veracity the story and the cake were a hit amongst the wealthy opera patrons of Vienna in the 1860s and 70s. And so it earned Eduard Zacher enough money that in 1876 he was able to open the Hotel Sacher next door but as good of a businessman as Eduard was it was actually his wife Anna Maria Fuchs who deserves most of the credit when it comes to the hotel's success, as she took over managing the property when Eduard
passed away in 1892. Now Anna was the daughter of a butcher and so she never accrued the social graces that the well-to-do clientele of the Hotel Sacher were accustomed, despite this she had brains and charm to spare. She was brash, always smoked cigars, and strode about the hotel with a pack of wheezing
French bulldogs trailing behind her. She was an icon, she was a legend, and she was the moment and she turned the hotel Sacher into a mecca for both tourists and European aristocracy alike but... <_< there were a few problems. One was WW1, in 1918 it brought everything crashing down, both the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and the Hotel Sacher's business. Now it slowly picked up in the 1920s but and
here's the second problem it turns out that Anna really liked hobnobbing with the elite and would let them stay at the hotel on credit which they would often not pay back and so by the time she died in 1930 the hotel was absolutely broke. The family now headed up by Anna and Eduard's son also
named Eduard decided that he was going to sell off the two biggest assets that they had the hotel and the naming rights to original sachertorte. See in the the preceding decades the cake had become
a staple of Viennese pastry shops and cookbooks but only the Sacher family could market it as 'the
original sachertorte'. Well if they weren't planning on making the sachertorte anymore then they didn't really need the name, and so they sold it to the Demel family who had in recent years taken over the bakery where Franz and Eduard Sacher had worked all those years before the sachertorte took off. The now dilapidated hotel on the other hand was auction off to a lawyer Hans Gürtler and his wife Poldi along with the hotelier couple Josef and Anna Siller. The Hotel Sacher was restored to its former glory, and to help pay for it they began selling the torte in the hotel itself as well as out on the street to passers by but they were a little miffed that the name 'original sachertorte' had been sold out from under them. Thus began a seven-year-long court battle that found its way all the way up to the Austrian Supreme Court where they decided that the name 'original sachertorte'
should belong to the hotel, and that Demel could call theirs the 'Eduard sachertorte' instead. Though it actually worked out for both parties involved because over the years the popularity of sachertorte had kind of waned especially with more modern cakes taking precedence but with the extremely long almost comically so court battle it gained prominence in newspapers not only in Vienna but all over the world, and so now when visitors came to Vienna they just had to try sachertorte. Today at the Cafe Sacher they produce 800 cakes a day, and around the holidays the number is closer to 3,500
but most of the 360,000 cakes per year are not eaten at the cafe itself but rather shipped
around the world. So yes if you wish you can order the original sachertorte as well as the Demel version, the Eduard sachertorte, to have and enjoy on your couch at home. But since I was in Vienna already I decided well I might as well go to both of these places and try them for myself. So first I visited Demel which has been around since 1786. It was opened by Ludwig Dehne and was originally called Dehne and that is where Franz and Eduard Sacher worked. In 1857 the business was purchased by a former employee Christoph Demel and that is where it gets its current name. And while they may not be able to legally call it the original sachertorte it looks absolutely delightful. I actually met with a couple viewers while I was there so I wouldn't look like quite such a glutton when I ordered
half of the pastries that they sold. Their sachertorte had two distinct layers of apricot jam which helped to counteract what I can only describe as a dry, yet deeply chocolatey cake the glaze was firm but easy to cut into. Overall I would give it 4 out of 5 Franz Sacher mustaches. Next up was the Cafe Sacher which is attached to the Hotel Sacher, the home of what is legally called the original sachertorte. An even drier yet perhaps more rich flavored cake. Frankly it was so dry that it just sort of crumbled apart, and the glaze was rock hard. It was really really hard to get through, and possibly that is if people who have worked there can be trusted, it is made with some egg white which makes it extra smooth but extra hard, and frankly not as enjoyable to eat. It is very chocolatey but overall I'd give it only 2 and a half Franz Sacher mustaches. Now to combat the dryness of this cake it is typically served not only with some coffee but with an unsweetened whipped cream called schlagobers. There's actually a ballet by the same name 'Schlagobers' that was written by Richard Strauss that premiered just across the street in 1924. It was a ballet all about baked goods and it included a scene where a boy hallucinates a battle between different cakes... or a riot of cakes (?)
that has to be put down by beer. <_< It's kind of weird but you know I'd like to see it one day
just to find out what what's going on. Either way it is called schlagobers and that does go with
the sachertorte so I decided to include that next to mine. And here we are sachertorte mit schlagobers. So this smells absolutely fantastic the whole house smells of chocolate. Hm, yeah. I'm a little worried it's going to be dry but you know supposed to be, kind of, but I will take it with a little schlagobers because it
is supposed to be eaten with that. Here we go. [Chomp] It's better than either of the other two. It's actually really, really good. It is not that dry. It is dense but not unpleasantly so. I have nothing bad to say actually. That's absolutely wonderful. The apricot jam adds a little complexity to the flavor otherwise it would really just be chocolate, nothing wrong with that but that apricot does add something that kind of sets it apartment from just a regular chocolate cake, and it does go well with the unsweetened whipped cream. Literally you just take cream and beat it until it becomes this consistency, no sugar, nothing. Also while the way that she does the glaze, and part of it might be my skill with chocolate is not quite as pretty as they've done by the professional pastry chefs who make hundreds of these a day. The flavor is better, the texture is better. The other ones are kind of hard. This is softer. I like it. I like a lot. So bonus fact, bonus story. There is actually a mention of this cake in a song by The Beatles. See in March of 1969 John Lennon and Yoko Ono stayed the night at the Hotel Sacher in Vienna, and they gave an interview from their hotel room. What was unique about the interview
was that they did this interview inside of a bag. It was something they termed bagism and was a satire on prejudice. Basically you couldn't be judged on your appearance if you were inside of a bag so it was just the message that you were giving that people would have to respond to. And during the interview a reporter asked John if he would come out of the bag for some sachertorte, and John replied we're not coming out during this this conference but later we will be out to enjoy some chocolate cake. And then in the Beatles song 'The Ballad of John and Yoko' there is a line "Made a lightning trip to Vienna/ eating chocolate cake in a bag." Now obviously I can't play the song here because who can afford a Beatles song but you can go look it up as I finish this this fantastic sachertorte. I'm seriously going to eat all of it. Yeah I'll see you next time on Tasting History. Schlagobers!
