Apple Strudel...Fail?

The family came over last night for Sunday Supper - and since we just got back from the river cruise and I've been talking so much about all the delicious food I wanted to experiment on them :)

I made stroganoff over rice like we had in Prague - googled a bunch of recipes and thought I'd found one that seemed similar but turned out it wasn't nearly as good as it should have been...so I'm not even sharing that recipe and will keep working on it. For dessert I made the apple strudel recipe that I posted about here, it also wasn't as good as it was at the demo where I watched them make it (Dave actually asked "did you follow the recipe they gave you on the ship?" like I used a completely different recipe haha! Yes, I followed exactly!) but only Dave and I knew it wasn't like the kind we had in Europe - everyone else at dinner enjoyed it so I decided to go ahead and post this anyway. It tastes really good, but I'm calling it a "fail" because it is not what we had while on vacation, since everyone else gave it a thumbs up I want you to make it and decide for yourself.

I haven't made very many videos - it's much harder to talk and work at the same time. Brooke makes it look so easy! But here I am making the strudel:




A couple changes I would suggest: it needs more sugar in the filling. Maybe when I figured out how much brown sugar I needed by weighing it versus the recipe calling for 1 3/4 oz I did the calculation wrong? Whatever, add a little more than 1/4 cup for sure. The dough seemed a little tough to me, maybe I didn't roll it out thin enough - get it super thin. I think it would also be nice to sprinkle with cinnamon sugar before baking, the top of the crust was a little dry.

I just made a copy of the actual recipe when I posted it before, it's in metric and ounces so I weighed everything to help make it easier for you to make this - hopefully I calculated it all correctly! I'm retyping it again with my amounts:

Ingredients

dough:
 12 1/4 oz flour (about 2 3/4 cup)
1 T. oil
1 T. melted butter
3 1/2 oz (100ml) lukewarm water (I used a glass measuring cup that has ml's on the side to measure)
pinch of salt

filling:
1 1/4 lb tart apples, peeled cored and sliced (about 5 or 6 apples, I used granny smith)
3 1/2 oz melted butter (one stick)
3 1/2 oz biscuit breadcrumbs (I used graham cracker crumbs, just shy of 1 cup)
1 3/4 oz light brown sugar (1/4 cup packed)
raisins, cinnamon, chopped nuts, lemon juice, rum (all optional)

Directions:

Peel apples and cut into thin slices. Gently brown the biscuit crumbs in butter. Combine all ingredients for the filling together.

Mix flour, salt, oil and lukewarm water and knead together with the kneading hook on the mixer for approx. 10 minutes until the dough as become smooth and elastic. Roll the dough into a ball and brush with butter. Using a sharp knife, cut a cross at the top of the ball of dough and then leave to rest at room temp for 2 hours, wrapped in cling film.

Sprinkle a table cloth evenly with flour. Roll the dough out as thinly as possible on the cloth. Place your hands, stretched out flat, under the dough and draw the dough over the back of your hand so that it becomes thinner and thinner. You will know the dough is ready when the pattern on the table cloth is recognizable through the dough, or when you can ready newspaper print through it.

Fill and roll the strudel together, being sure to use the table cloth to help you, by raising the end with the filled dough just enough that the strudel begins to roll on its own accord. Grease the apple strudel with melted butter and bake in preheated oven at 400' for 30 minutes, or until golden brown.

Makes 6 servings

resting dough

I can read my note thru the dough so I thought it was thin enough,
after baking it though I think it needed to be rolled out even more.

before baking the strudel