if you want to pep it up, just "strudl" it!

on my last post i mentioned that i sometimes transgress my rule of low cal by wrapping my veggies up in puff pastry. as much as i like that, i really need to pull myself together in order not to drift off into my old habits.i figured i could still indulge in wrapped up food and make it a little healthier. on my quest to substitute the junk with healthy stuff i once more was digging into our family traditions.

i was always fascinated with the way my grandma used to make strudl. though it was mainly the plain old apfelstrudel on our menu we would also have a savoury strudl every once in a while.

the greatest thing however was watching my grandma preparing the dough for the filling , which we call "strudlziagn" - loosely translated as "pulling the strudl". i was sitting next to her, my legs dangling under the dinnertable and i was completely hypnotized by the way she was transforming a sticky lump into waferthin and perfect sheets of strudl the size of the dinner table. that was real art. it was tricky, you had to be quick and i never ever have seen one single hole ripped in her thin sheets of dough. you could virtually read a paper through it. how she managed to do this was beyond me. and it still is, actually.

sometimes some of the grandchildren where allowed to help and granny would give us little lumps of dough and a dish cloth and we would make a sticky something that was looking like a pizza. displeased with our poor achievments she would always grab the "pizza", scrunch the dough up, lifting it up in the air and letting it hang from her hands and pulling it in shape at first. when it had the right size she would place the dough on the cloth and with quick movements she pulled and tuged a litte - within less than a minute our lumpy stuff was a perfekt piece of raw material for her strudl.

in remembrance of my late grandmother i tried to make the perfekt strudl myself today. don't get me wrong, i have made strudl before. you just HAVE to make strudl when you're austrian :). but i always bought the thin sheets of strudldough. today i actually tried to make the dough myself and i did the "strudlziagn" myself as well. THIS was the real challenge.

125 g flour
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
a dash of salt
water as needed (about 100 ml)

01 sift the flour onto your working space or in a bowl
02 make a dent in the middle and add oil, salt and water
03 combine to a smooth dough and let rest at room temperature for about twenty minutes
04 you can use a rolling pin to bring the dough in shape. you can also use your hands and try the traditional way of "strudlziagn *ggg*

as you can see, i did not really succeed, i ripped the sheet while i was rolling the strudl. hey, this is really a hard thing to do with such delicate pastry! but even the leaking thing is rather nice to look at. so i don't count this as a flop, i actually am rather proud of the outcome.

guess my grandma would be proud too ... well, actually, i think she would have grabed my lumpy thing and made some propper strudelteig out of it :)

i still miss her sorely.

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