Easy peasy Homemade Spätzle

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! We're in Berlin and skipped the traditional meal this year, but ate at a crazy huge international market in a ritzy mall tonight. Looking forward to getting out and exploring the city this weekend! This post was for earlier this week, but I had problems uploading photos, so here it is today. You could make some spaztle for a side dish for Thanksgiving :)

I attended my very first cooking class ever Friday night with my friend Stephi, and appropriately, it was a spätzle cooking class. Yum. I love spätzle. And I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to make!

Spätzle is a type of egg noodle, or dumpling you could say, typical in Bavarian cooking. Spätzle means "little sparrow". Before the invention and use of mechanical devices to make these noodles, they were shaped by hand or with a spoon and the results resembled spatzen (little sparrows). In our cooking class, we used two types of spätzle strainers that were so easy to use. Can't wait to buy one so I can start making my own at home.

Our cooking teacher handed out 15 recipes to make from apple spätzle to chocolate spätzle to the standard kasespätzle (cheese spätzle) and everything in between! We divided them up and got to work after she showed us how to to make the basic spätzle recipe. Stephi and I made spinach first, then a dessert version of sweet spätzle with a poppyseed cream sauce topped with sweet plums. Delish! Here is the recipe below for the basic spätzle. Comment below if you would like any of the other recipes I mentioned.

Basic Spätzle Recipe:
500 Grams Flour (we use a Spaztle flour, but all purpose or wheat works fine too) - Close to 4 Cups I believe, but we used a scale in class.
1 Tsp Salt
3 Large Eggs
1 1/4 cups water

1. Add the flour and salt to a bowl. Stir to combine. Crack the eggs into a small bowl and whisk them. Make a well in the center of the flour mixture and pour the eggs in it. Add the water (or milk). Whisk the dough until smooth and shiny and a bubble or two appears.
2. Bring at least 2 quarts of lightly salted water to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Using a spätzle maker of your choice, press the noodles into the simmering water and cook until the noodles float to the top. Use a slotted spoon to transfer the noodles to a pan with melted butter and mix.

We all finished up at about the same time, spread out our dishes, grabbed our plates and dug in. So freakin good! I stuffed myself to the gill and brought home enough leftovers to feed an Army. My favorite side dish recipe was probably the triage (spinach, tomato, and hazelnut spätzles all mixed together), and my favorite dessert dish was probably apple spätzle or the chocolate spätzle with a raspberry sauce. So divine. Hard to decide.

Have you all ever attended a cooking class? If you could go to one, what would you like to learn to cook? Hoping I can sign up for some more of these in the future.