This Sweet Stollen Bread Is The Ultimate Christmas Bread {+ video} - The Tortilla Channel (2024)

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It has everything you need in sweet bread and it is perfect to serve on Christmas morning. Turn it into a decorative ring and it will be the centerpiece of your table. Ready to learn how you can make stollen bread? Let’s get started!

How To Make Dutch Sweet Stollen Bread

1. To make this recipe start with the raisins. Put the raisins in warm water so they can plump up. Leave the raisins in the water until you need them in the recipe.
2. Drain the raisins before you use them in this bread recipe.

Make Almond Paste

1. Put an equal amount of almonds and sugar in a kitchen machine and blend. Then add the egg until you get a soft paste. Add some lemon juice for freshness.
2. Take the paste from the kitchen machine onto cling film and store it in the fridge for at least an hour.

Make The Stollen Bread

1. For the stollen bread first, add all the dry ingredients together and mix through with a wooden spoon. Then add the milk and egg. Leave the butter aside and knead the ingredients into a flexible dough for 8 minutes by hand.
2. Be aware that the dough can be very sticky when you start. Resist the urge to add more flour. Just flour the board and keep on kneading it will become less sticky.
3. You can dampen your hands with water to make the kneading easier. Now add the butter in small increments. Make sure that all the butter is absorbed into the dough before adding more butter.
4. Save some butter for brushing. Let the dough proof for an hour so it can double in size. Roll into a square and add ¾ of the raisins and chopped pecan nuts.
5. Fold and roll again into a square. Take the almond-sugar paste out of the fridge and spread it across the square and the remaining raisins and pecans.
6. Now roll the square up into a thick sausage. Cut through the middle and braid the dough by twisting the two halves.
7. Then roll the braid into a circle. Preheat the oven to 375℉/190℃ and bake the bread on a baking tray in the middle oven for at least 35-40 minutes until golden brown.
8. Let the bread cool for 10 minutes and brush with the remaining butter.
9. Some icing sugar for decoration and you have an amazing Dutch Christmas kerststol bread ring. You can have this bread for breakfast, brunch, or lunch.

Christmas Stollen Bread Recipe

With Christmas around the corner, I am treating you to a Dutch specialty which is a kerststol also known as stollen bread. This bread is a sweet bread with raisins and almond sugar paste.

To make it even more special you can braid it into a bread ring. Just looking at the result you will want to take a bite. Believe me, if you have taken a bite you want to eat the whole ring.

The original recipe is called kerststol which is a rich bread with raisins, currants, nuts, and almond sugar paste.

The almond sugar paste is easy to make from scratch and needs to be shaped into a sausage. In regular stollen bread, the sweet almond sugar paste is centered in the middle, and you can see the paste when you cut the bread into slices.

So to infuse the whole bread with the almond-sugar paste you can braid it with two tails. Braiding the bread this way gives the bread a more subtle almond sugar taste and it is decorative as opposed to the original shape.

Making this bread requires some serious kneading. If you have a kitchen machine with a dough hook you can let it take care of the heavy lifting.

I made the dough by hand and after combining all of the ingredients the dough had to be kneaded for at least 8 minutes to let it become elastic and a little sticky.

Then the butter is added and kneaded thoroughly into a flexible dough.

Be aware that when you start making the dough it can be very sticky and difficult to handle. Resist the urge to add flour but keep on kneading it will become less sticky.

You can dampen your hands to make the kneading of the dough easier.

See How to Make Dutch Stollen Bread

Would you like to see how to make a real Dutch stolen bread yourself? Then watch the instruction video with step-by-step instructions in the recipe card.

The video shows how to easily make the Christmas stollen yourself.

How To Store Stollen Bread

There are a couple of ways you can store this Christmas stollen bread. Bread doesn’t store well in the fridge so that is not one of the options:

• Bread tin – you can store it outside of the fridge for a couple of days in a bread tin or a Ziploc bag
• Freezer – slice the bread into smaller pieces and store it in the freezer for a couple of weeks

More Traditional Dutch Recipes

If you like this traditional bread recipe you may also like some of these Dutch recipes. Take a look:

• Oven-baked puff pastry apple beignets
• Traditional Dutch pancakes
• Traditional Dutch oliebollen
• The best Dutch apple pie

I hope you love this stollen bread recipe as much as I do!

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