As it is Eurovision tonight, I’ve given a fair amount of thought to Austrian cuisine. Other than ‘schnitzel with noodles’ (and bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens etc etc etc) the only appropriate food seemed to be good old apple strudel. As someone who dislikes cooked apples and sweet pastry, this failed to ignite my excitement, but what Eurovision requires, Eurovision gets.
So, strudel. Having watched Bake Off’s strudel task and read a few bits and bobs I understood that strudel was a bit of a bastard to make from scratch, what with all the stretching and spreading of the pastry. The only alternative, however, is to use filo pastry, which tastes of paper and is therefore not worth the bother. So I sought out help: Felicity Cloake was my saviour here. She wrote one of her Guardian ‘How to Make the Perfect’ pieces on apple strudel (if you’ve never read this column you absolutely must, it’s brilliant), and I used this as my guidance.
Newsflash: strudel is nowhere near as hard as ‘they’ would have you believe! Huzzah! Follow what that nice lady Felicity says and it will all be ok (although I did use different apples: half bramley; half Braeburn).
The chucking of the pastry at a work surface for fifteen minutes is hugely fun; you end up finding a rhythm and enjoying the different tempos and tones of the ‘slap slap SLAP!’ and can very much work out all that pent up desire to wallop people.
Anyway, the final result was an enormous hit with people who like that sort of thing. I even tried some. It was nice, as far as appley pastry things go. Admittedly, I did need to work a little harder on getting the pastry thinner, but it was definitely a success. So much so that I’m going to make it again.
So there you go! Google ‘perfect strudel’ and have a go. Definitely better than an Iceland special!
mamaCaz 