Oil bolls (Oliebollen)

For around 10 servings of 4 each: Preparation: Mix the flour and salt. Separately mix the yiest and sugar with a little bit of milk until bubbles appear. Then combine the two mixes into one.

In a separate bowl, mix the egg with the leftover milk. Now add that to the mixture from the previous step. The result is your basic dough.

Then, add in the additional ingredients such as raisins and pieces of apple to the mixture.

Let this rise for one hour under a moist cloth or cover the bowl of dough with a plastic plate. Do not stir the dough during or after the rising period.

Rub two spoons with oil, and scoop bolls (roughly the size of a small peach) out of the dough. Deepfry in oil that has a constant temperature of 160 degrees Celsius. It is both misleading and historically correct to mention that the bolls turn themselves over when one side is done; in the everyday practice of us home cooks, the bolls are not accurately round and take free form shapes, so don't count on this built-in turnover but just flip them yourself to maken them golden brown on the outside.

Serving: With (plenty of) powdered sugar, in which the oil bolls are dipped or under which they are burried. They may be eaten either hot or refridgerated. Serve something to drink with them; milk is a great add-on. On a traditional Dutch newyears party, there is one giant bowl with 30-60 of those oil bolls, with a stack of platters and powdered sugar standing by, ready for anyone's attack.

Storage: The texture of the oil bolls decays quickly, making them unpleasant to eat. Try to eat them within 2 days after preparation.

Information: This is a traditional Dutch pastry, eaten to celebrate newyear. After the year has changed, people often go and visit friends and family, and get treated to these oild boils. They're fat, unhealthy, and (thus?) delicious.

Variations: You may simplify this receipe by leaving out some or all of the ingredients from the raisins on. Many Dutch people do that, anyway. It is nice to make a number of varieties, since a person can easily eat 4 oil bolls if they aren't too fat.

Instead of yiest, a bit (say, up to 1 dl) of the milk is often replaced with beer, which gives a nice flavour to the oil bolls. Please note that when a Dutchman says "beer", he does not mean Buttwater. Take a lager with a rather strong, bitter taste. Amstel, Grolsch, or Japanese beers are all good. But so are several local beers, as long as they are not too fruity.

The receipe used here describes raisins. The original ingredients are 40 g raisins and 40 g currants.

Another option is to slice apples into 1 cm thick slices, and dip those in the dough and deepfry these. These things are called appelflap (apple flap).

Pronunciation: When pronunciated well, oliebol sounds a bit like "volleyball" without the initial "v" sound and a longer "o", as Desmond d'Souza once pointed out to me. The plural is oliebollen, which adds the sound of "an". Appelflap is pronunciated close to "apple flap", but replace the sounds for "a" in this with the sound of "a" in "market".