Apfelstrudel

March is my month of Austrian cuisine. So far I've tried two traditional Austrian dishes - Spätzle and Apfelstrudel. The Spätzle was fairly easy and came out well, but the apple strudel will take some practice. I made it today with a lot of help from my husband, who peeled and sliced the apples, after we binge-watched half a dozen of videos on strudel recipes. In the end we chose this recipe by My German Recipes.

I think, as a first try with this tricky dough, my apple strudel came out fairly decent, but not perfect. The dough was too much for one strudel and next time I will try to make the strudel with half of the dough. The legends that you have to be able to read your newspaper through the stretched dough have their reason - the thinner it is, the crispier and tastier the strudel is. 

Another note - I followed the recipe and my apples were slightly sour and tart, I also added the juice of half a lemon, as the recipe calls, and as a result the filling is not sweet enough. Next time I will omit the lemon juice, it would be better if the filling is sweeter. Of course, may be the problem is that we didn't have any vanilla sauce or ice cream and served it with chilled white wine for desert, a sweeter addition could have made a difference.

Here are the ingredients I used:

For the dough:

• 400 g flour
• 150 ml lukewarm water
• 1 egg
• 1 pinch of salt
• 3 tbsp sunflower oil
  

For the filling:

• 800 g peeled and chopped apples
• 140 g sugar
• 50 g bread crumbs
• 70 g butter
• juice of 1/2 lemon
• cinnamon
• confectioners sugar
  

I baked the strudel at 190C for 1 hour, until golden. I also made a small bun, filled with pear jam, from the cuttings of the dough.

I am not perfectly happy with my first strudel, but making it was definitely fun and I will try it again. And of course, if all of the attempts at the perfect dough fail, one can always use filo pastry :)