Apfelstrudel (Apple Strudel)

This week for Amiexpat's Real German Cooking Challenge, we made Apfelstrudel (Apple Strudel). One word describes how I felt about this all week before making it: INTIMIDATED! I don't consider myself a baker - so to make a dish that involves dough, kneading, rolling, stretching, and baking - well... wow... can I do it?!?

Turns out, the intimidation faded as I progressed through the steps of the recipe. Making the strudel dough was interesting - after I combined the egg, oil and flour - the mixture was very dry and not binding together too well - but as I added the water, little by little, it turned into the dough that I wanted it to be. (after adding a little more flour at times)

Stretching the dough was my biggest fear - NEVER have I done this before, and the recipe states to stretch it until tissue thin - yikes! I took off my rings and jewelry and got to it - it really wasn't as bad as I thought - once again - whew! You can see in the picture how the stretched out dough looks -I had a few holes in it, but my German cookbook specifically stated to NOT try to fix any hole that was created - so I didn't!

Here is the picture of it rolled with the apple mixture inside of it (I had some extra lemon juice/liquid in the apple mixture that I chose to discard vs. using for fear that it would make it too soggy): The rolling pin shows how big the strudel was before baking - ignore the big hole on the dough.... ;-)
I put the strudel in a U shape in a cake pan to bake. I did add more milk while baking (as the recipe states to do if needed) - probably about another cup! My strudel was soaking it up! It baked for about an hour, with basting it every 10 minutes with the milk and butter mixture in the pan around the strudel.

While it baked, I couldn't help but to keep saying "Strudel" like the "German" man in the IHOP commercial (view it here) with the streusel pancakes - terrible commercial but obviously has a catchy line!!!


Here is the final picture of it when it came out of the oven - I think it turned out great! It made a huge strudel! We enjoyed it plain - but DH mentioned that vanilla ice cream would have be great with it. This strudel is more substantial than a "typical" strudel that we are used to - and I think baking it with the milk and having the sour cream inside the filling contributed to this.

I am glad that I did this recipe - I enjoyed breaking through my intimidation barrier to create the dish and prove to myself that it can be done!

Can't wait for this week's challenge - Bring.It.On! :-)

Thanks Christina!