Sachertorte
Vienna's famous chocolate and apricot cake. Sachertorte pairs chocolate sponge with apricot jam and a dark glaze. Its Vienna origins, the long Hotel Sacher and Demel rivalry and how to serve it.
A slice with cream: Rizka, CC BY-SA 4.0
A teenager's cake
Sachertorte is named after Franz Sacher, a cook in Vienna. The best-known story says he created it in 1832 for Prince Metternich and his guests, when Sacher was only 15 or 16 and still an apprentice. That date comes from his son Eduard, but Franz himself later linked the cake to the 1840s, when he ran a catering business in Pressburg, today's Bratislava. With no papers from the time, historians still debate which is right.
Either way, the cake caught on. A recipe for a chocolate cake in the Sacher style appeared in Katharina Prato's popular cookbook around 1867 to 1870, and when Eduard opened the Hotel Sacher in 1876, Sachertorte was on the menu.
What makes a Sachertorte
The cake is a dense chocolate sponge, lightened with whipped egg whites, spread with apricot jam and covered in a smooth, dark chocolate glaze that sets with a gentle fudge-like bite. Austria's food codex defines it: the batter must contain butter, flour, eggs, sugar and at least 15 percent chocolate, and apricot jam is essential. Versions with other jams cannot use the name.
In Vienna it is served with a generous spoon of unsweetened whipped cream, which balances the rich chocolate and makes a slice feel lighter than it looks.
The sweetest rivalry
In the 1930s Eduard's son sold the family recipe to Demel, a famous Vienna pastry shop, which began selling its own single-layer Eduard Sacher-Torte, while the hotel sold a two-layer Original Sacher-Torte. A long legal tussle followed over who owned the name. It ended in 1963, with the hotel keeping the title Original Sacher-Torte and Demel selling Demel's Sacher-Torte.
Both still guard their exact recipes. The hotel opened its own Sachertorte manufactory in Vienna in 1999 and reported making about 360,000 cakes a year in 2007, and ships cakes around the world. The two seals tell them apart: a round chocolate seal at the hotel and a triangular one at Demel.
Tips for baking one
At home, use good dark chocolate, warm the apricot jam and strain it so it spreads thinly, and let the cake rest a day before cutting. The flavour mellows and the jam soaks slightly into the sponge. Because of its high butter content, Sachertorte keeps well at cool room temperature for several days.
- A slice with cream: Rizka, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Hotel Sacher, Vienna: GrahamBould, Public domain
Text written by Chocolate Era.
