Strudel Elves

Hi!
I took a pretty long hiatus from this blog, over two weeks since my last post, I believe. This isn't to say that I haven't been baking treats, just that I have been to tired to report about them, busy celebrating various holidays and doing all of that other stuff that fills my time in between culinary classes. In my last six classes, we have made pies and tarts galore. There have been pie fillings in nearly every imaginable flavor (alas, no banana cream) and have experimented with different doughs, from the flaky to the sweet and back again. When it came time to roll out and bake traditional pies (I was assigned pumpkin) I crimped and rolled my dough-a Pate Sucre this time-with gusto. I know you will tire of hearing this, but making pie is fabulously fun and I would be more that happy to bake some with/for anyone who asks- after all, I need that practice.
My personal favorite type of pie was a galette. Galettes are rustic pies baked without a pie pan, free formed on a baking sheet. The filling simply placed in the center of your dough, which is rolled into a rough circle, and then the edges are folded in onto the filling, leaving some peaking out. Brush with cream, sprinkle with sugar and bake! Chef described it as an open faced pie (bad description chef- all pies without a top crust are "open faced". I would just describe it as a rustic pie, which I did only a few sentences ago.)
Last Tuesday night, we made something unusual and incredible to make- Strudel. Good old fashioned, old world strudel. The old world I am referring to Austria, or perhaps Hungary. Though we haven't all hailed from such places, chances are you have all probably eaten/seen strudel before. It is a flaky pastry filled with either cheese or apple and topped with powdered sugar. If you are lucky, whipped cream is served on the side. They are very very tasty. To make strudel, you make a pretty basic dough with flour, water, eggs and the like. Then, once it comes together, you form the gluten by slamming the dough against the counter. 100 times. No exaggeration, I was in charge of counting for my team. You pick up the dough, throw it hard against the counter (floured, naturally), fold it up and repeat until the dough is smooth and pliable. Then, once the dough has rested (and recovered from the brute treatment), the real fun begins.
Roll out a clean, think white table cloth and cover it with flour. The dough at this point is about an eight by eight inch blob, four inches thick. With the help of two or three classmates, this changes fast. You begin to stretch the dough, from the center out. Palms down, with the back of your hands (fingers poke holes) bring the dough from the center outwards. The goal is to get the dough so thin that you can read a paper through it. The eight by eight inch blob becomes a five by five foot blob that you can, indeed, read through. We made it through the process with only minor tears (it is very hard to remember to stretch with your palms down- reflexes tell you to stretch it with your fingers!). Then, brush the entire thing with melted butter and sprinkle with either bread crumbs or cinnamon sugar, depending on your filling. Place filling on one end, and then using the table cloth, roll up the filling over and over in the paper thin dough. Imagine using a sushi mat to roll up a California roll, only infinity larger, flakier and butterier. (i'm getting awfully annoyed at spell check for insisting that butterier isn't a real word). Brush with more melted butter and bake. Once cooled, sprinkle with sugar and slice. Though I couldn't taste it, the cross-section of this thing was enough to tell me how flaky it was.
Chef claims that there are old women in Europe who can do this process by themselves. These super human woman apparently have a huge arm span and the ability to fly; strudel elves. Would you doubt anything Chef says? Neither would I.

-Sarah, das strudel stretcher