Winter Beer Stollen

I understand the author wants to give options, but the recipe is confusing. How many cups of filling should be used?

 

The filling volume will vary slightly depending on the choice you make (cherry almond or fig prune, for example), but in general you will be working with about 3/4 cup of liquid ingredients and 2–4 cups of solid ingredients. And you'll end up with two loaves of bread.

 

Thanks! Below the filling options recipes, the article discusses layering different flavors of beer soaked fruit. I was confused because this could imply using both of the dried fruit variations, but it sounds like that would result in too much filling. So, if you want to try different beers it sounds like you need to split within a given filling recipe (or make more loaves).

 

Ya almost lost me at "1 cup dark raisins"... and then after realizing the need for 5 (+?) different beers needed to make bread. Expensive bread. Too much dough for my blood (get it?)

 

You only need five different beers if you want ten loaves of bread (the recipe yields two loaves). Each of the five types of filling combine beer and fruit, so if you don't like raisins and Stout, try the variation with cranberries at Witbier instead.

 

Fantastic sounding recipes, though I agree they're a little bit confusingly presented.

Quick question - how important is the cup of barley flour? With so many other ingredients it feels like one could get away with substituting regular but maybe it provides something special to the texture?

Looking forward to making this. We just cautiously started baking recently by making biscotti so this seems like a no brainer next step.

Lastly, every time I open this page I initially think that somebody's beer was stolen.

 

This is a fairly standard Stollen recipe aside from the beer. I make Stollen every year as Christmas gifts and I can see where the method as it is presented here could be a bit confusing. However, it is easy to break this down into manageable steps.
Pick two of the fillings and soak them the day before. Say, the eisbock soaked fruit and the run barrel aged raisins. (Whatever liquid the fruit doesn't soak up, strain it before you use it.)
Weight out all the ingredients for the dough and follow the procedure as listed. It is fairly simple as Stollen is a wet into dry bread. I like to need mine by hand because my kitchen aid can't handle the amount of dough I make.
The recipe looks longer than it actually is because of the instructions for the multiple filling options but once you decide what you want to put in it you can skip some of it.
As for the barley flour, it isn't something I use in Stollen but I would follow the recipe as the density of certain flours are different. It could throw off the liquid measurements.

 

Anyone who cooks with Rockefort 10 needs to be slapped