Week 41 - German

I love learning about dishes from all over the world (no surprise, given our Around the World Cooking Challenge), and when I was watching one of Beryl Shereshewsky's videos about sandwiches a while back (love the whole series - video link), I heard of something called toast Hawaii for the first time. Apparently it's ham, cheese, and pineapple on toast (sometimes with a maraschino cherry on top), and it was made popular in West Germany in the 1950s by a TV chef there. It sounds a lot like our (very controversial) Hawaiian pizza, but based on German commenters, it still seems decently popular now (although it seems most skip the cherry, which was fine by me, since I did not plan on buying maraschino cherries just for this). I marked it down on my list for the German part of the AtWCC, and with the Week 41 challenge being German, it sounded like a great brunch!

Although the dish seemed straightforward enough to make without a recipe, I used the one at Daring Gourmet as a guide for oven temperature and cook time. Basically, toast the slices of bread (I did 6, two for each of us), melt the butter, and then to each slice, add a layer of butter, a slice of ham, a pineapple ring, and a slice of Swiss cheese. I baked it at 425 degrees for 10 minutes, and the cheese was melted, so this was pretty quick and easy.

The one complication I did have was that we had no cans of pineapple rings, and when we went grocery shopping the day before, they had no cans of pineapple rings. I'm actually not sure if Whole Foods even sells pineapple rings. So I took the pineapple chunks we did have, halved them, and made my own rings, and it worked out just fine.

The toast was really tasty and a great breakfast! If I made this again, I think I would use a little extra butter (did 1/2 tbsp for each slice of bread) and add garlic powder and some pepper to the melted butter before spreading it. I also think that, if I use the same ham that I did this time, I would use two slices instead of one for some extra ham flavor, as this one was sliced fairly thin. This toast is similar to some I've made in the past, but with pineapple added, and although I'm not a huge sweet-savory person, I do think it was good with the pineapple. Then again, we also like Hawaiian pizza, so it's no surprise this worked for us.