How to make the best Apfelstrudel | Monika Blunder

Hi guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. We're still in quarantine, and the one thing that's been really keeping me kind of sane and normal is baking. I've been baking up a storm, and I really wanted to share with you guys this particular cake I'm making today. It's called an Apfelstrudel, Apple Strudel. It's a really, really famous Austrian dessert. It's the first cake I've ever learned how to make through my grandmother in Austria. My mother made it all the time when I was growing up. It is quite easy. The one little bit tricky and complicated part is the dough, but I'm really gonna get into it and show you today in this video how to make the dough. So let's get started, and let's make an Apfelstrudel. All right, let's start with the dough first. The things you need is, I always like to measure my flour with a scale. So you need about 250 grams of flour. Then we're gonna need one egg, a little bit of salt, a little bit of vegetable oil, lukewarm water, 1 1⁄8 of a liter. I have that right in here. And I actually make my dough with my hands. You could do, use it in a KitchenAid or a Cuisinart, but I just learned how to make it with my hands, and I just like it that way. And I always feel like the dough just turns out better with my hands for some reason. But I do use a dough scraper, which looks like that. So let's get started, and I'm gonna show you how to make the dough. All right, guys, so this is my flour. I put it on a flat surface in my kitchen. And then I just use my finger, and I put a little bit of a hole right in the middle. And now we're gonna put in the egg, one egg. I put that right in the middle right here. And then I'm gonna add a little bit of salt, just a pinch. And we're also gonna use a little bit of vegetable oil. And then I'm gonna take half of the shell of my egg to measure the oil. You need about half of the egg shell. And that will also go in the middle where your egg is. And then we're going to work. And what I do is I just sort of like mix up the egg a little bit. I use only my right hand. And this part gets a little bit messy, but I promise you it will all come together. Slowly add a little bit of water. Not the whole thing, just a little bit. Make sure that the water is lukewarm. And just sort of like press everything together with your fingers. And then slowly add a little bit more of your water. Now you can use your dough scraper. And it's slowly coming together, but it still needs water. I can tell it's still really dry. So we'll add a little bit more of our water. And now you can tell it's slowly turning into a dough, but it still needs some work. Now the real work is starting because now we really have to work the dough. I can feel the end coming. So what's really important, what my grandmother taught me at this stage now, is you really want to press the dough with this part of your hand. So you roll it and then press it. Roll it and press it. My grandmother used to always also say you can throw it and then press it. So if you're angry at somebody, just think of that person, throw the dough and roll it. You want the dough to start looking shiny on the outside. Dough is ready. Now it has a really beautiful shine on the outside and it feels really good. Now we're going to form it into a ball like this. And now I'm going to show you the next step. What I like to do now is I put a little bit of this vegetable oil into a bowl, just about a splash with my fingers. And now I'm going to put the dough into my bowl, turn it around like one or two times. And this is what it looks like. And now I'm going to put like a little towel over it. And now I'm going to let the dough rest for the next 30 minutes. All right, guys, so the dough is done. The dough is resting for the next 30 to 45 minutes. Now in that time, I'm going to make my filling. What you need is 10 apples. I like using green apples. You need 10 apples. I'm going to peel them and slice them. And you're also going to need some sugar, some rum, some lemon, cinnamon. I'm going to leave all the exact measurements in the description box. Let's get started. Let's make the filling. All right, so I just peeled my 10 apples and now I'm just going to slice them. So I put this nice piece of fabric here onto my surface area. And now what you need is some flour. And we're going to put some flour on that cloth. And now I'm going to add my dough, which looks like this. This has been resting for the last, like I would say 45 minutes. There's still some oil on it. So take some of your flour, again, right here. Put a little bit on the dough. Just take that excess oil off. And now I'm going to show you the next step. So I'm going to roll out my dough first and stretch it as far as I can go with the rolling pin. And now I'm going to use my fingers. So I'm going to lift up the dough and I'm going to kind of like turn it. And your goal is you want to make it as thin as possible. And I just use my fist like this and then just turn it. Can you see what I'm doing? I stretch it a little bit with my fist and then I just turn it and then do it to about here. And now I'm going to lay my dough again back to my fabric. And now we have to just use our fingers and stretch it and stretch it and stretch it as much as we can. And this is definitely a little bit more of tedious work, but you have to get it as big as possible. My grandmother always said it's right when it's really thin and you could put a piece of newspaper underneath the dough and you can read the newspaper. That's how thin you want to get the dough. Now let's make the strudel. Now I already did the dough. As you can see, it's nicely spread out. It's nice and thin. Don't worry about the little holes right here. That's okay. Don't worry about that. That always happens with me. Now I'm going to take my filling and I'm going to put the apples directly onto my dough. And I like to just spread it out nicely. There's some juice in there. I'm not putting the juice on top of the apples. It's going to get too watery. So kind of like just press the apples and leave the juice inside. And there's my dog. Hi, Ollie. No, this is not for you. All right, I'll just spread it out a little bit. Next step, the apples are on. You need breadcrumbs. Some people put their breadcrumbs directly into the apple mixture. I don't like doing it this way. I put it on directly on the apple now. I'm going to measure for you guys now. This is a third cup. I would say this is about a third. Okay, these are two thirds of breadcrumbs. That's about right. Okay. And then this is about a half a stick of butter. I'm going to put the butter on top of the apples. Sort of like spread it out again. Right here. And then I take a scissor, a kitchen scissor, and I'm going to cut the edges of the dough, the thick part, like here. Great. Now we just cut off the excess. And now we're going to roll it together. So this is why this towel or this fabric comes in handy. I'm going to do the first part, which you're going to roll up right here. Then we're going to take our towel, lift it, do another roll, and just do that in steps. Lift it and roll. Okay. One more, a little bit like that. And now what I'm going to do with this end part, I'm going to put a little bit of butter, melted butter, and then we're going to lift this part up and lift it over like that. And now I'm going to take the ends right here and just roll them together. And then this part is no good. Just roll it together right here too. Okay, then you're going to need a cookie sheet with some parchment paper. And now we're going to put that strudel on right here. So the way how I like to do it is I lift both of them up, roll it over one more time. Ah, this is the right way. Okay. All right, so now you can just form it a little bit with your hands and make it look like a half moon. And that's how it looks. Look how gorgeous that is. Now we're going to put a little bit of that melted butter from earlier and put that on top of the strudel. I mean, look how beautiful this is. It's going to go now in the oven between 35 and 40 minutes at 350. See you soon. It's time to take out the strudel. All right, let's turn this oven off. And there he is. Gorgeous. All right, after the strudel has cooled off a little bit, we're just going to add a little bit of powdered sugar on top of it. So let's cut into this Apfelstrudel. What I like to do is I like to cut the ends off because they're not as pretty. And then I'm going to just slice it for you guys so you see what the inside looks like. All right, let's put it on a plate. And, oh my God, it's still warm. Yum. This is what it looks like. I like to eat it like this, obviously the least amount of calories, but it's really good with some whipped cream or ice cream or vanilla sauce. It's so delicious. Yum. Let's try it. It's perfect. Hope that you guys enjoyed this baking video. I love making an Apfelstrudel because it reminds me of home. It reminds me of growing up, and especially in the times we're in right now. We're in quarantine and nothing feels better than a little bit of comfort food. So I hope you enjoyed this. Let me know if you want to see some more baking videos. Leave me some ideas down below in the comments. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and I'll see you soon.