In search of childhood - strudel

I sometimes try to recreate experiences from my childhood. Its not always easy and most times the experience is not the same. In one area though I do have consistent success and that is food. Trying to recreate what I saw my parents and grandparents make is something that has gone well.

It seems the farther I am from the places I grew up in the more I am inclined to bring back the tastes of those places, especially the way I remember them growing up. This time I take a stab at making a traditional apple strudel the way my grandmother used to make it. I do have my grandma's recipe at my disposal but the most important ingredient, flour, is so different here in California that I will hack the recipe. This recipe has been adapted to fit your screen in California.

Also if you are not comfortable flying by the seat of your pants, then this recipe is not for you as there are few exact measurements.

Ingredients

• 8 sheets ready made filo pastry - I used the Safeway brand
• a handful of raisins
• 3 cooking apples - granny smith, bramley etc
• 2 eating apples - fuji for example
• plain breadcrumbs - this soaks up the apple juice, use more if you are using juicier apples
• butter - about 1 stick, melted
• raisins - soak in brandy or rum
• walnuts or pecan nuts
• sugar - brown or white use depending on how sweet your apple mixture is
• cinnamon - 1-2 tbsp

Execution

• Set your oven to 350F.
• Peel, core and grate the apples. Use a coarse enough grate, you don't want apple mush at the start.
• Add breadcrumbs, sugar, nuts, cinnamon and raisins to the grated apples. For me the other ingredients act as a complement and I will add them in appropriately small quantities. Its above all an apple strudel after all.
• Follow the preparation instructions on your ready made filo pastry to get 4 sheets. Roll up half the apple mixture in the first 4 sheets and use the rest for the next.
• Bake at 350 for 35 to 40 minutes.

Result

The end result I found was a good enough approximation of my grandma's apple strudel. The original 'pulled' pastry required for the strudel is a butter/margarine based thin flaky pastry much like filo. the last part of its preparation entails rolling it out and pulling at it by hand to make it thing enough. I recall vividly helping my grandma with this. It was always interesting to find out how thin I could make it go without cracking. Also the original would always call for walnuts, but I didn't have any at hand when I set off to make this.

Filo pastry makes the strudel a bit harder and more brittle than the original. I found that the strudel was better the next day as it had absorbed some moisture and the flakiness was reduced.