Making Strudel the Old-Fashioned Way (despite my best intentions to go modern)

I promise a new baking post soon, maybe even tonight, but in the meantime, please enjoy this post from the DH, Paul LaRosa, about my baking-related experience this weekend!

FedEx delivers from Brooklyn to Manhattan — by air!

Normally, I have no complaints about FedEx. They do a pretty good job with most everything I send but last night I entered into the twilight zone of FedEx and the experience left me feeling like Tom Hanks in “Castaway” without the coconut to keep me company.

My wife is planning an event this week called “Real Housewives of Henry Street” and the idea is to show how immigrant housewives lived on the lower East Side back around 1905. In fact, the event costs $19.05 to get in. Clever, right?

Anyway, one of the treats she’s cooking up is apple strudel and she plans to make a lot of it. She needed a dough hook to knead the strudel dough so she wouldn’t be tied to the kitchen all day like, you know, a 1905 housewife.

Taking advantage of a modern convenience, she went online and ordered a dough hook to be delivered to her by FedEx to her work address which is on Henry Street in Manhattan. That’s where the fun began because there is also a Henry Street in Brooklyn and, for whatever reason, FedEx took it upon themselves to make “an address correction” and sent the dough hook to Brooklyn. My wife found out about the mistake yesterday and told FedEx they had made “an address in-correction” but it was too late. The hook was in Brooklyn, not far from Red Hook coincidentally.

After many phone calls and hours on the phone, she told FedEx she would pick up the package at the FedEx “world center” in Brooklyn. Some anonymous person on the phone agreed.  And that’s how we wound up on a very rainy Friday night on a long line at the FedEx “world center” in Brooklyn in a neighborhood where you definitely wanted to make sure your car doors were locked.

Finally, we got to the front of the line and, after much hemming and hawing, a FedEx gal produced a package. We signed, relieved and were about to walk out when I looked down at the name — it was not my wife’s.

“This is the wrong package,” I said.

The FedEx gal then disappeared into the back again and, when she reappeared, said another employee was doing her “a favor” by looking for our package. This is why I love when FedEx packages just appear and I am not forced to come face to face with this kind of customer service.

Another ten minutes went by and finally, a rain-soaked, frightened-looking FedEx clerk appeared. “Your package is here but I can’t give it to you,” he said. “It’s already been containerized and on the truck.”

Now mind you, we could see the trucks which were in the next room, a garage.

“What does containerized mean?” I asked.

“It’s in a container in the front of the truck and we can’t take it out without taking out a whole bunch of other packages. I’d get in trouble. We have to make the plane but it will be in Manhattan tomorrow.”

There were a couple of things about what he said that struck me. First that the package was going to the correct address, Henry Street in Manhattan but no one would be at my wife’s closed office the following day. She needed the dough hook to make a whole lot of strudel for the Sunday event. It was get it now or forget it.

The other thing that struck me was….THEY WERE PUTTING IT ON A PLANE TO GET TO MANHATTAN?????

“What do you mean, you’re putting it on a plane?” I asked. “There are no planes that go from Brooklyn to Manhattan!”

“Right,” he agreed, “we’re flying it from New York to Newark and then it will be delivered by truck to Manhattan.”

Even Mr. Rain-soaked man could see how insane this was. Remember, the package we desperately needed WAS IN THE NEXT ROOM AT THAT VERY MOMENT!

“I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do,” he said. “That’s just how we do things.”

I flashed on Tom Hanks with his stopwatch in “Castaway” where he plays a FedEx employee and realized he had nothing on this guy.

What followed were a lot of irritated sentences that ended with the phrase “you realize how insane this is” but he wasn’t budging. Finally, my wife told him to send the package back from whence it came — if she didn’t get it immediately, she couldn’t use it. The irony is that she wound up making the strudel by hand with no help from a motorized dough hook — just like they did in 1905.

I Was a Strudel Virgin

I'm happy to report that I conquered my fear of strudel -- and then ate it!
I had a very compelling reason to practice -- on September 25th, I'm baking apple strudel for the 60 guests attending The Real Housewives of Henry Street, 1905, an event I'm hosting at Henry Street Settlement.

Making strudel dough is fun, much easier than you might imagine and very satisfying.  I was lucky to get a fabulous recipe from Jane Ziegleman, author of 97 Orchard, who will be the event's main speaker and who will demo strudel dough, with audience participation!

Basic Strudel Dough (Jane Ziegleman)
Ingredients
2 cups bread flour
1/2 tsp. salt
2/3 cup warm water
1/2 tsp. white vinegar
3 tbls. vegetable oil
4 tbls. melted butter for brushing the dough
1/3 cup breadcrumbs

Special equipment
clean cotton or linen tablecloth
pastry brush
rolling pin
parchment paper

Combine the flour and salt in a mixing bowl.  Make a well in the center of the bowl and pour in the water, vinegar and oil.  Stir from the center outward in ever widening circles until all of the flour has been incorporated into the liquid.  The dough should look shaggy and somewhat dry.
Turn dough onto a floured work surface and knead vigorously for 10 minutes.  Alternately, you can knead the dough in a standing mixer using the hood attachment for 3-4 minutes.  After kneading, the dough should be springy and glossy.  Coat lightly with oil and leave in a covered bowl to rest for at least 1/2 hour.

While the dough is resting, prepare your filling. (See recipe below.)
Preheat oven to 425.

Cover a fairly large table with a clean tablecloth and dust well with flour.  Place dough on the dusted cloth, flatten with your palms and, using a rolling pin, roll into a 9 inch circle.  Drape the dough over the backs of your hands, you fingers loosely bent, and begin to pull the dough outward, stretching it gently.  Keep rotating the dough so it stretches in all directions.

 When it gets too large to handle, lay it on the table and continue.  Ideally, the dough should be rectangular, 3 - 4 feet long, and thin enough to see through.  The edges will be comparatively thick; trim them off with kitchen shears.

Brush dough lightly with melted butter.  Sprinkle with breadcrumbs.  Spread filling along the bottom third of the dough.  To roll strudel, hold the edge of the tablecloth that is closest to you and gently raise it above the surface of the table so the strudel flops over.  Repeat until strudel is fully rolled.

 Using the tablecloth as a sling, transfer strudel to a baking tray that has been lined with parchment paper.  If the strudel is too long, bend it into a "U" shape. Brush one last time with melted butter.  Bake for 20-25 minutes or until golden and crisp.

Apple Strudel
1 recipe basic strudel dough
Ingredients for filling
5-6 tart apples, peeled and finely sliced
1/4 cup sugar (or more to taste)
1 tsp. cinnamon
juice of 1 lemon
1/3 cup chopped walnuts
1/4 cup currents or raisins

Mix and knead strudel dough as instructed.  While dough is resting, prepare the filling.

Preheat oven to 424.
Toss apples with sugar, cinnamon and lemon juice.  Stir in chopped walnuts and raisins.
Ross out strudel according to instructions in the Basic Strudel Recipe.  Brush with butter and sprinkle with breadcrumbs.
Spoon filing along the bottom third of the dough, leaving an inch or two on the sides to prevent the filling from oozing out the ends.  Roll strudel.  Transfer to baking tray.  Brush the top with butter and bake for 20-25 minutes or until golden and crisp.

Cheese Apple Cake

This cake is like a lot of guys I dated -- they had possibilities, but needed some *work* to reach boyfriend perfection.  And so it is with Cheese Apple Cake -- an excellent and unusual cake, but one whose execution needs a bit of tweaking to make it as good as it can be.

This is, in fact, not a cake but a very large biscuit flavored with cheese.  Not that there's anything wrong with that!  I've never been a fan of the cheese and apple pie combination, but if you are, this may be the perfect cake for you.

The bottom (biscuit) layer is made by cutting the butter into the flour, a normally tedious task made easy with a food processor.  Just cut cold butter into chunks, add to the flour and pulse until the butter is the size of small peas, or smaller.

After the butter is incorporated, add the rest of the ingredients, including grated cheese.

When the batter is all mixed and you place it in the pan, it will look like it does below.  You need to gently press it down until it is evenly distributed so that the entire bottom of the pan is covered.

Next, slice some apples -- I used about three or four medium ones -- and arrange them atop the bottom layer. The arrangement, like most relationships, need not be perfect to work.

The next step is where the recipe can use some tweaking.  Instead of using confectioners sugar, as the recipe calls for, use regular old white sugar.  Confectioners sugar, which contains cornstarch, does not melt in the heat of the oven, leaving the just-baked product with an odd and kind of displeasing powdery topping.  You can see it in the picture at the top and below.  (I ended up over-baking the cake because I kept waiting for the sugar to melt -- don't do that!)

But after I let it sit for a day, some kitchen magic happened:  the confectioners sugar dissolves into the apples, creating a lovely European pastry-like glaze on top. That was a nice and unexpected surprise, which tends to happen a lot more in baking than in relationships.  (Although DH turned out to be a nice and unexpected surprise, so it does happen!)

Brownies (Best Recipe)

A new study from the University of Cambridge touting the health benefits of chocolate sent me right to the kitchen last night to whip up a batch of brownies from a recipe in Olive's collection.  The recipe, attributed to one Babe Gregware, is labeled (Best Recipe), so I just had to try it, health benefits or not.

The verdict?  Excellent, very chocolate-y brownies.  DH called them "old-fashioned," quickly adding "not in a bad way."   They are not exceedingly sweet and have a lovely, fudge-like texture that hold together much better than more modern versions.   The recipe didn't specify what size pan, so I used a 9 x 12 one, thinking that because of the four eggs, they would rise.  But they didn't, yielding a thin brownie.  I do think this recipe would work well in an 8 or 9-inch square pan if you want a heftier brownie.

Whenever chocolate is the star of a recipe, as it is in brownies,  I suggest using a high quality product (like Scharfenberger or Valrhona) as opposed to Baker's.  The result is well worth it and, after all, it's for your good health, so splurge a little.

Two Zucchini Cake Wrecks

While Hurricane Irene was "raging" outside, inside my kitchen I experienced a natural disaster of another sort. Not one, but two, cake failures.

Both were for zucchini cakes.  Never a fan of serving vegetables (in any form) for dessert, I nonetheless relented when I found two seemingly good, and intriguing, recipes in Olive Facey's collection.

The bottom half of the cake *finally* released from the pan after much banging and maneuvering.

The top half clung to the pan.

In fact, one of them was quite delicious -- it just didn't release from the pan, a "fancy" bundt pan I had purchased at a garage sale.  Even though it was non-stick, I went the extra mile to grease and flour it, so as to insure a smooth release. That pan is headed for the recycling bin, just as soon as we scrap every last bit of cake out!

(Failures like this probably deters a lot of people from baking --you can do everything right, but make one mistake (like choosing the wrong pan) and all effort seems for naught.  But that's not the case, because each mistake is one you'll never make again.  And most times, you can eat your mistakes and sometimes even serve them!)

Serving an intact cake with the orange glaze I had made (fresh-squeezed orange juice with confectioners sugar) dripping down the cake's crevices would have been the perfect send-off for evacuees DD and her boyfriend.  They had stayed with us during the storm, and were just about to go back to their apartment when this came out of the oven.  But, despite its unappealing appearance, everyone loved it -- even DD's boyfriend who told me he does not like zucchini cake.  If only I had used my tried and true aluminum bundt pan, this story would have had a happier ending.

And it almost did.  I had them wait a few more minutes, while I took cake #2 out of the oven.  It looked ok at first, but then the center of the cake sunk deeper than a tropical depression.  Plus, despite the promise of a really interesting flavor (ginger and orange peel), it just wasn't that great. And oddly, even though there was just 1/2 cup zucchini in this cake (as opposed to two cups in the other one), it had a much more pronounced vegetable taste, not always a good thing.  Still, I've saved it and hoping the flavors will develop into something delicious overnight.

Both recipes are below. The first one is definitely worth another shot.

Drizzle Biscuits

There's nothing drizzle-like about these traditional baking powder biscuits, except that I made them this morning during the "Drizzle of the Century," as we're now calling Hurricane Irene's descent on New York City.

But these are so good and so easy to prepare, that there's no need to wait for a storm to make them.   The most difficult part --cutting the butter into the flour -- is easily accomplished using a Cuisinart.  But even if you don't have one, you can do it the old fashioned way:  using two knives or even your fingertips.  The idea is to quickly incorporate cold pieces of butter into the flour until it's a crumbly mixture, a process that makes the dough quite tender and flaky when baked.

I happened have a biscuit cutter, but you can simply cut out the biscuits using a drinking glass, as the c. 1950s recipe suggests.

This recipe makes about ten biscuits, or more, depending on the size of your biscuit cutter, or drinking glass.

These were a big hit, especially among the evacuees (DD and her boyfriend) we were sheltering during the storm.

Lemon Cake Pie, Competitive Baking and Zelda Fitzgerald

Lemon cake pie is a pie for cake lovers. Its traditional pie crust is topped with lemon custard which is topped with a thin layer of lemon cake.  This is one of these real kitchen magic recipes:  One just pours the batter into an unbaked pie crust and the discrete layers form during baking.

This is a delicious, lemony confection, a true winner or so I thought until -- for the second time this summer -- my pie failed to take a blue ribbon at a pie contest.  But I stand by this pie and encourage you to try it at home.

This vintage recipe -- and the only pie in Olive Facey's collection -- calls for ingredients (pictured above) commonly found in American pantries.  A little research revealed that this unusual recipe may have originated with the Pennsylvania Dutch.  (Olive's son Stephen explained that while his mother loved pie, she didn't love making pie crust.  I can totally relate.)

Zest the lemons before juicing, and if you have a pilot light atop your oven, it's the perfect place to melt the butter.  The recipe calls for butter the size of an egg -- I used four tablespoons, or half a stick.

The most complicated part of the recipe (aside from making the pie crust) is beating the whites and yolks separately, then folding the whites into the yolks.

Below is a small lemon cake pie I made as a test before attempting the 9-inch pie for the competition, pictured here because I failed to photograph the larger (and much better looking) version.

The pie contest was part of the Jazz-Age Lawn Party held last weekend on Governors Island, a short ferry ride from Brooklyn and lower Manhattan.  It was a beautiful day and the setting was lovely and I was shocked to bump into this whole subculture of people who embrace (in dress and music) an era whose heyday was nearly a century ago.  You can see DH's excellent photographs of the costume party here (or check The New York Times tomorrow or Sunday -- Bill Cunningham was there taking pictures, too.)

One of the joys of competitive baking  is meeting the other contestants and they just don't come more charming than Lee Chappell who made two of the most gorgeous pies I've ever seen (and generously told me the secret to making candied lemons).  This photograph below does not do them justice.  One is a lemon pie with lavender and the other is a plum pie made with several kinds of heritage plums.  He won for his third pie, a strawberry rhubarb.

My humble (but really, really good) pie is below.