It’s Sunday, I didn’t go shopping, and the kids are screaming for pizza. No yeast and no quark in the house, but it is still possible to make a delicious pizza without yeast and quark.

Ingredients for 3 people

For 1 baking tray, you need 300g flour, 1 sachet of baking powder, approx. 75 ml olive or sunflower oil, 1 tsp salt, and some milk.

Preparation

Mix the flour, the packet of baking powder, the salt, and the oil, preferably with a hand mixer, until you get a crumbly mass, then keep adding a little milk until the dough binds. Sometimes it happens that the dough is a bit sticky, then you can add a little more oil.

Spread the dough out on a pre-greased baking sheet or parchment paper, spread with tomato sauce (mix the tomato passata with Italian herbs or pizza seasoning + a little salt), and top with the desired or existing ingredients. Then spread cheese over the ingredients, for a particularly good taste you can also spread some mozzarella.

Put the tray with the pizza in the preheated oven (200° top/bottom heat or 180° convection) and let it bake for about 30 minutes.

Useful additional knowledge

The baking powder makes the dough a little thicker and fluffier, but you can prevent this by using a little less baking powder.

Stiftung Warentest tested apple juice – with mixed results. Not-from-concentrate juices perform best, most juices are mediocre. The test method misses a major problem.

After orange juice, apple juice is the second most popular juice in Germany: we drink around six and a half liters of it per capita a year – not including apple spritzer. The selection of products in the supermarket is correspondingly large.

Stiftung Warentest has now tasted 26 apple juices and examined them in the laboratory. The result: only six juices – all naturally cloudy not-from-concentrate juices – scored “good”. Most juices are satisfactory, three are fair, and one fails with poor.

Apple juice: Naturally cloudy direct juice convinces in the test

Of the 26 apple juices in the dough, 16 are not-from-concentrate juices. This is juice that is briefly heated and bottled immediately after the apples have been pressed. In the case of juices made from juice concentrate, on the other hand, the pressed juice is processed into a concentrate using heat, which is later diluted back into juice with water and flavorings.

“The test shows that the naturally cloudy not-from-concentrate juices are superior to the juices made from concentrate, especially in terms of taste,” says project manager Janine Schlenker. Apple juice is naturally cloudy, but it can be clarified by centrifuging and filtering. Sometimes gelatine is also used for filtering, which is why such juices are often considered non-vegan.

According to Stiftung Warentest, naturally cloudy juices are also healthier than clear ones because they contain more effective plant substances (polyphenols). These are mainly found in the cloudy matter. However, apple juice contains hardly any natural vitamin C.

Dough winners and losers

Among the six good juices are two organic juices:

Voelkel Demeter apple 100% direct juice
Van Nahmen organic apple juice from meadow orchards
The conventional naturally cloudy direct juices from Edeka and Lidl also do well.

Both the not-from-concentrate juices from Aldi Nord and popular branded juices – such as from Amecke and Pfanner – are only satisfactory in the test.

Among other things, the naturally cloudy juices from Dm Bio and Granini scored “sufficient”. The testers criticized both for a comparatively low aroma content, and for the granini juice also for unclear declarations on the sugar content and alleged CO2 neutrality.

Of the eight organic apple juices in the test, only the two above did well, four others (Aldi Nord, Edeka, Lidl, Rabenhorst) with satisfactory.

The naturally cloudy Alnatura apple juice was the only juice to score unsatisfactory in the test – the laboratory found a high content of ethanol, volatile acidity and acetoin. According to Stiftung Warentest, this indicates inferior quality apples or improper processing. However, the levels are not harmful to health.

Dough ignores pesticides

What you should know: In contrast to the Oko-Test, the “sensory judgement” (i.e. the taste) is rated the most at Stiftung Warentest. The “chemical quality”, on the other hand, only accounts for 15% of the overall assessment.

The laboratory apparently did not check whether there were any pesticide residues. The use of pesticides in apple cultivation is widespread. In 2020, Oko-Test found traces of pesticides in all conventional juices in the apple juice test – in some even several and some particularly problematic.

No pollutants, but not necessarily healthy

After all, the Stiftung Warentest laboratory did not find any other residues or pollutants that were harmful to health, such as mold toxins or germs, in any juice.

However, nutrition experts repeatedly point out that fruit juices are not suitable thirst quenchers. They contain a lot of fructose.

The German Society for Nutrition (DGE) does not even classify fruit juices as drinks, but as fruit and vegetables – because according to the experts, drinks should be “low-energy”. This applies to water and unsweetened teas, but not to juice. In order to be able to more easily implement the recommendation to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, one portion of fruit can be replaced by 200 milliliters of fruit juice, but not every day.

Yeast dough is versatile and not difficult to make. We will show you a classic and a vegan recipe for sweet yeast dough and tell you what is important when it comes to the dough – and also how it is made into a braid.

Recipe for vegan yeast dough without egg, butter, and milk

You can easily make a vegan, sweet yeast dough yourself.

You need for this:

500 g flour (light organic wheat or spelled flour)
80 grams of sugar
1 cube of yeast
250 ml plant milk (e.g. oat or soy milk)
70g vegan margarine
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
1 pinch of salt
Optional: some light-colored jam for spreading, quince or apricot jam without pieces is best.
You also need:

a bowl,
a whisk,
a kitchen scale,
a pastry brush,
a clean tea towel.

This is how the vegan yeast dough succeeds

Whether for Easter or for a nice Sunday breakfast – you can easily make a vegan yeast plait yourself with a little preparation time. There is no need to use eggs, milk or butter, because this vegan yeast dough is delicious and buttery soft.

How to make the dough:

Place all liquid ingredients and in a bowl. The plant-based milk and margarine should be lukewarm.
Add the yeast cube and stir until it has dissolved.
Then add the salt and sugar to the liquid.
Add the flour while stirring constantly until the dough has reached the typical consistency.
Knead the dough well on a floured work surface for several minutes.
Cover the bowl with a tea towel and let the dough rise in a warm place for at least an hour. The cloth is important to protect the dough from drafts.
The dough is ready when it has doubled in size.
Important: The decisive factor for a successful yeast dough is the temperature. With fresh yeast, the liquid should be warm but not hot. If it’s too hot, the yeast culture will die and your dough won’t rise. Cold, on the other hand, does not harm the yeast. It just takes longer for your dough to rise. If you’re not in a hurry, you can leave the dough in the fridge overnight and bake it the next day.

This is how you succeed in making the perfect yeast braid

Take the dough out of the bowl and knead it well again on a floured work surface.
Divide the dough into three equal parts and form long strands out of the dough balls.
Braid the strands of dough loosely and pinch the ends together.
Use a pastry brush to brush the braid with some light-colored jam or plant-based milk.
Place the braid on a baking sheet and let it rise for another 20 minutes.
Halfway through the resting time, preheat the oven. If you want to bake with top and bottom heat, set the stove to 200 degrees Celsius and 175 degrees Celsius for circulating air.
Bake the braid on the bottom shelf of the oven for about 25 minutes.
Take the braid out of the oven and let it cool down a bit.

Recipe for classic yeast dough

For a classic yeast dough you need:

500g flour
80 grams of sugar
1 cube of yeast
250 ml lukewarm milk
70 grams of butter
1 pinch of salt
1 organic egg
You also need:

a bowl,
a whisk,
a kitchen scale,
a pastry brush,
a tea towel.
The preparation and processing of the classic yeast dough hardly differs from that of a vegan one. The following variant is for a yeast dough with pre-dough:

Sift the flour into a bowl and mix it with a pinch of salt.
In another bowl, mix lukewarm milk with sugar and crumble in the yeast. Stir the liquid a little until the yeast has dissolved.
Make a well in the flour and pour in the liquid. Thicken the yeast milk with a little flour using a spoon and then leave the bowl covered for 15 minutes.
Then add the other ingredients and knead the dough for several minutes.
Cover the bowl with a tea towel and let the dough rise in a warm place for at least an hour.
The dough is ready when it has doubled in size.
You can use this dough as a base for cakes or a yeast plait. If you want to make a yeast plait, you can brush it with milk before baking to brown it nicely.

Tip: If you made too much dough, you can freeze the leftover yeast dough. It will last up to six months this way.