Strudel di Mele

Strudel pastry belongs to the wider Austro-Hungarian tradition, and the technique of an ultra-thin stretched dough is usually traced back through the Hungarian rétes to the layered Ottoman pastries of the baklava family, spread across the Habsburg lands. The oldest known strudel recipe is a handwritten manuscript kept in the Vienna town library, dated to around 1696. South Tyrol came to the dish as part of that Austro-German world before the province passed to Italy after the First World War, and the local abundance of orchard apples in the Adige and Venosta valleys made apple the natural filling. Older claims tracing strudel to antiquity are folklore; the documented record begins with the Viennese kitchens of the late 17th century.

A good slice shows a tight spiral of crisp, wafer-thin pastry around a soft, juicy band of apple. The pastry shatters cleanly and is never doughy or thick; the apples are tender but still hold their shape, tart against the sweetness. Rum-plumped raisins and pine nuts stud the filling, cinnamon and lemon lift it, and the layer of toasted breadcrumbs against the pastry stays just dry enough to keep the base from going soggy. Eaten warm, the contrast of the brittle crust and the warm, scented fruit is the whole point; left to sit too long, the pastry softens and loses its snap.

Everything rests on the stretched dough. A high-protein flour worked with a little oil, warm water and a long rest develops the gluten so the dough can be pulled, not rolled, over the backs of the hands until it is thin enough to read newsprint through; the oil and resting relax the gluten so it stretches without tearing. The toasted breadcrumbs scattered over the dough are not decoration — they soak up the juice the apples release in the oven, so the bottom layer of pastry crisps instead of stewing. Tossing the apples with lemon slows their browning and sharpens the flavour, while the sugar draws out some juice during baking. In the hot oven the thin sheets of dough dry and crisp almost instantly, setting the spiral before the fruit can soften them.