This is hands down my favourite desert. I roped Andy into helping me make one from scratch. It's summer. He's awesome. It's good to have a project inside when it's so hot outside.
My benchmark for apple strudel is from Triest. We were staying opposite one of the original bakeries who did everything by the traditional method and their strudel was amazing. I got a piece everyday we were there.
I had always wanted to make one but I thought the pastry would be far too difficult. They are simply not the same with filo. To have proper strudel you need the proper pastry and it needs to be very thin. But knowing what i do about bread making now I can tell when a dough is at that stage of elasticity and strudel dough is no different, however you sort of take it even further so that it is very very stretchy, then rest it for an hour at room temperature.
It's a good thing to make with 2 people because it helps when rolling out, then stretching the dough with knuckles then rolling the whole thing up on a floured cloth. It's a bit delicate but easy if you're set up. We then rolled it on to a piece of baking paper to bake.
It's a very light desert. A small amount of flour and sugar and a little butter, not much. The point of a strudel is that the pastry is very fine, crispy and it's jammed full of apple.
We used pain d'espice spice mix, that lovely spice blend from the Alsace. We used plenty of it too because we like to taste spice. And some lemon rind. Salted butter in my opinion is essential or add a little salt to the apples. I used this recipe and would so again. Absolutely utterly scrumptious. It is up there with the best I have had ever (and I have gone to great effort to do some serious study on this matter in Europe).
 |
| With filling in tact. Rolling it in this paper thin dough we'd stretched ourselves.... |
 |
| Cooked, gorgeously perfect apfelstrudel |
No comments:
Post a Comment