Oodles of Strudel!

Today was another culinary first for me.  In class we made traditional strudel from scratch, start to finish, which included stretching our own strudel dough!  Until today, I had only used puff pastry or phyllo dough to make strudel, but neither has the same delicate, flaky crust that traditional strudel dough yields.

Whereas quickbreads such as biscuits or banana bread can be overmixed, there is no such thing when it comes to strudel.  We mixed our dough today for 12 minutes on medium to high speed.  The goal was to develop the gluten strands in the dough so that a medium sized ball of dough could be stretched from this:

to this:

Keep in mind that we allowed the dough to rest for about an hour before we attempted to stretch it.  After it rested, we stretched it until it was paper thin.  Notice in the picture above, you can see the blue table cloth through the strudel in some places.  In order to stretch it this thin without tearing it, we used only the backs of our hands and slowly stretched in out to cover the table.  If you try to stretch the dough with your palms facing upward, you risk puncturing the dough with your fingertips.

Once the dough was stretched thin, we brushed the entire exposed surface of the dough with melted butter.  Then, we gathered our filling ingredients.  One commonly made mistake with sweet strudel is the preparation of the filling in advance.  If you combine the sugar and fruit in advance, the fruit will begin to macerate and break down.  The water that is pulled out of the fruit will end up in your strudel making it soggy which is no good.  Instead, we mixed our sugar, spices, nuts and raisins in a separate bowl.  We sprinkled the mixture over the chopped fresh fruit just before rolling it up.  In class, we also sprinkled bread crumbs over the fruit to absorb any excess moisture that baked out of the fruit.

Finally, we rolled it up using the table cloth.  If you try to roll the dough, around the fruit with your hands, you risk tearing it, and it tends to roll up unevenly.  We pulled the table cloth towards us as we rolled so we didn't have to move down the table to continue rolling it.

After one final coat of melted butter, we transferred our strudel to the oven and baked it at 400 degrees until the crust was flaky and golden brown.  We sliced it and dusted the entire strudel with powdered sugar before pulling any slices off the cutting board.  Here was my group's finished product before we transferred the slices to a plate.

We also had an edible cup with homemade maple walnut ice cream that was placed on the plate, but it wasn't added until just before it was served in the dining room.  Therefore, I don't have a picture of the plate with the ice cream.  We plated our apple walnut strudel with cinnamon chantilly cream, a caramlized sugar spiral, caramel sauce and creme Anglaise.  I tasted some right out of the oven and it was delicious!