Growing in the Garden, Growing in the Sun: Making Krautstrudel

Another attempt from the Great German Baking Journey. Lettuce know if you like the recipe.

When one hears strudel, they think of flaky pastry, fruit, and whipped cream, but savory strudels also exist. In true German fashion, this recipe combines cheese, pork, and cabbage. This dish is a hearty meal for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, though most would prefer dinner or lunch. This is the sister recipe to kartoffelstrudel, which substitutes cabbage with potatoes. The swirl comes from the pastry when it ir rolled with the filling (think a swiss roll!). You will need to use Quark to complete this recipe.

Krautstrudel is on pg. 163 in Luisa Wiess's Classic German Baking cookbook; you can use this recipe to make krautstrudel if you don't have a copy of the cookbook. Feel free to follow Weiss on instagram.

I messed up by using gluten free pound-for-pound flour thinking it would give the same results. My pastry crust was more of the texture of corn chips and not at all delicate, or flaky, or layered. I would love to re-try this recipe with traditional all purpose flour. Besides the crust mishap, T loved it, and though he said it was "different," there were no leftovers.

Would I make it again? Maybe, if I had a bunch of cabbage that I didn't want to make into a coleslaw or salad.

The whole point of the book is the Weiss claims to adapt the traditional German baking recipes for an American in an American kitchen. What Ameircan kitchen has a piece of cloth that is wider than a beach towel and twice as long, made with cotton or linen just hanging about? For sure not mine, or my mothers, or either of my grandmothers. I don't even know where to buy one. Does Amazon even have that?! It makes sense to me to go out of ones way to buy the traditional german flavored ingredients, and to have common baking tools of the trade, but this was a rather strange request for the weird shaped fabric, that left me flabbergasted once I was in the middle of making everything.

This was a very labor intensive dish and also very time consuming. I timed it around 2.5 hours total active time to prepare. That did not include cool down, or plate prep.

You can read about my German Baking Journey here. You can see all my Classic German Baking posts here.

Disclaimer: I created my initial German Baking Posts in Winter 2019/2020 with plans to launch the blog in February/March 2020. You will notice that photos were taken in my Brooklyn kitchen, and a lot of the commentary is written pre-COVID19. Recipes were made using my CSA Veggies (learn more about my Brooklyn CSA here), and were to be eaten by myself and significant other at our leisure. It is now over six months after I planned to originally publish these posts (hence my change of vision post from June 1), but later is better than never.

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