The Core Facts

Overall verdict: A sublime dessert. I’ve discovered that apfelstrudel is one of those items that tastes 100x better when you bake it yourself.
Timings: 15 mins prep + 60 mins bake in oven
Sugar: 50g + whatever is in the filo pastry
Butter: 100g + whatever is in the filo
Type of apple: Doesn’t specify – I used Bramleys

The Long Peel

It took me a while to find a recipe for apple strudel from an Austrian chef. And Eduard Frauneder’s Apfelstrudel recipe is a bit weird – I think the website messed up the ingredients by listing them all twice. But I persevered and was rewarded for my trouble.

The Pastry

I’m not going to lie: I absolutely loved Eduard telling me to take some sheets of filo pastry out of a box rather than starting pastry production from scratch.

He asks for only 3 sheets of filo, with melted butter being applied between each sheet. A mixture of sugar and breadcrumbs is applied to the final sheet before the apple mixture is loaded on.

The Apples

Eduard asks for 350g of thinly sliced apples to be mixed with raisins, walnuts and 1.5g of cinnamaon. In the end I could only actually fit about 300g of the apple onto the pastry.

I was worried about the 1.5g of cinnamon as it seemed like a huge amount. The Martha Stewart apple pie had been ruined by too much cinnamon and I feared the worst. It turned out to be absolutely delicious.

The Bake

60 minutes seemed like a long time for filo pastry. I covered it with foil for the final 15 minutes, just to stop it burning. It didn’t look hugely impressive when it came out of the oven. All the magic happened at the slicing stage!

The Dish

I had to abandon my trusty 23cm pie dish for this one. Eduard does not provide any instructions on what you should use so I placed the pastry on a large baking sheet.

The Hot Slice

I was surprised at how easily it sliced into neat pieces. Every forkful was spectacular:

The Rested Result

You can see how much the apples have softened – absolutely delicious:

If We Repeeled

• I’d use more sheets of filo

Scores

Simplicity of bake: Simple
Pastry texture: Crisp on top but with a firm base
Pastry taste: Fairly plain – the filling does all the taste work
Apple texture: The apples were mushed up nicely
Apple taste: Spectacular – there’s a lot of cinnamon but you could taste the apple
Apple to pastry ratio: I’d have liked a little more pastry but it wasn’t far off
Overall score: 9 out of 10