Take two

January 22, 2011 by goodcookbecky 1 Comment

Apple strudel take two.. that’s right. I made a few errors in forming my apple strudel and wanted to see if I could do it right.. I did.  I made changes to the strudel dough to make a larger quantity making it easier to work with.  I used Rick Rogers’ recipe as a guide and made a 1 1/2 recipe for the dough.  This pulls out to a much larger surface, but is still workable and not too big to handle.

Becky’s Strudel Dough

Ingredients:

• 2 cups flour
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 2/3 cups water
• 3 Tbsp vegetable oil
• 3/4 tsp apple cider vinegar

Preparation:

Place the flour and salt in the bottom of the mixing bowl of your Kitchen Aid mixer (if you have one: you could also mix by hand).  Use the paddle attachment to mix the ingredients at this point.  Combine the liquids in a glass measuring cup.  Slowly add the liquids to the flour and salt with the mixer on low.  You may need to add more water – I actually added a little flour as it was sticking to the bottom of the bowl a bit (not very much though less than 1 Tablespoon).  Scrape the dough into a ball and  switch to the dough hook attachment.  Continue kneading the dough at medium low to make a soft ball.

Transfer the dough to a un-floured pastry board.  Knead by hand and occasionally pick it up and slam it down hard on your board from time to time, this will get the gluten activated and make the dough pliable.  Remember you will be stretching it into a very thin layer of dough, much like a filo dough.  Pour about 1/2 teaspoon of vegetable oil into the palm of your hand and gently rub the top of the dough with the oil.  Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and let it rest for at least 30 minutes even better 1 1/2 hours or more!

Wash your hands (wear a t-shirt) and wash your forearms all the way to your elbows and take off any jewelry or watches that could snag and damage the dough as you pull it.

Use a table, kitchen island or card table for the next step.  Cover your work space with a clean table cloth (if the table cloth has a pattern it is actually an aid you should be able to see the pattern of the cloth through the dough and you can see where the dough still needs stretching)  and sprinkle it with flour and rub the flour around to cover the work space. This time I did not roll the dough out with a rolling pin.  I picked the dough up and stretched it a bit much like you would a pizza dough, rotating it to stretch it in a circle. Once it was too big to handle I placed it on the floured surface and proceeded as I did the day before.

I found that pulling the dough was easiest when using the back of my hand to pull and stretch the dough.  My hands would be toward the center of the dough and my arms had dough draped over them — I pulled from the center going out, walking around the kitchen island to work on different parts of the dough.  In the end I had an almost 2 foot by 3 1/2 foot dough pulled – I imagine it could have and should have been pulled out more, but it was my first time and this was my first strudel. The edges will be thicker than the inside and that part gets cut away..  kitchen shears make this process very easy.  Once the edges are trimmed away it is ready to be filled.  Choose your filling.  This time I am making apple strudel, so I will use apples, rum soaked raisins, tossed with cinnamon sugar, but other fillings can also be used.

For filling see previous post to complete the strudel.  Even though I made the amounts larger for the dough the filling stays the same.

Here are the pictures of my “Take Two”.  As you can see the dough still had holes, but less of them and the strudel was prettier in the end.   I served it with the same vanilla sauce as in the previous entry.

I will keep the changes I made to the strudel dough.  It worked out nicely.

Advertisement