Christstollen, step 2

So I left the peels to firm up over a couple of days, just with some wax paper lightly placed over top.

Then I picked a day, a couple days before I made the stollen dough, to mix all the citrus, raisins, almond slices and currants together. I cut up the citrus:




And mixed everything.


Something about the dried currants. I bought a bag of them from the grocery store. The bag said "Currants", but I did not pay attention to the words beneath it that said: "Raisins de corinthe". When I ate some of the dried "currants" upon opening the bag, they tasted just like raisins - just smaller. The use here of "Currant" is some corruption, presumably by the French, which they use for a different kind of grape. This pissed me off a little. No matter. To me there just has to be currants - the real black currants - in stollen. No matter, there were simply more raisins. No major harm done.

What you do is take some rum,


and do the right thing:


Some say do this a few hours before making the dough, some say over night. I say a good couple days - and after the first day, pour a little more rum into the mixture, and some more the next day, and a little the day you make the dough. Of course, throughout the days, you want to be mixing the stuff around on occasion. There ought to be some rum left over in the bowl after the mixture is drained. It was not so this time around. For all the rum I poured in, the mixture absorbed it like a sponge.

It's good to have leftover rum that doesn't get absorbed because it goes into the milk which you scald for making the dough.