Tuesdays With Dorie: Rugelach

 I've always been more of a bar cookie sort of girl.  Brownies are by far my favorite--and not just because they are chocolate.  Five ingredients, one bowl, and forty minutes later, I have a treat ready for kids coming in through the door or a room full of hungry adults working out the details of one or another community activity.  So, it was with great trepidation that I looked over the directions for today's recipe that my Tuesdays with Dorie group was baking and blogging about. 

The March 6th recipe that the Tuesdays with Dorie group decided to work on was rugelach.  Rugelach is a traditional Jewish dessert that is usually made rolled up like a croissant, though it can also be made by rolling up the dough jelly roll style and slicing it before baking, which was how this recipe was made.  Filled with an assortment of dried fruits and nuts, the pastries come out soft, moist, and extremely flavorful.  They are certainly a unique and delicious dessert.  I am glad that I had a chance to try making them this week.  The recipe can be found on p. 325 of Baking with Julia or at Jessica's website My Baking Heart.  Jessica's pictures are wonderful, but she left out a few extra bits of the recipe, so I will post them down below.  

 First, my own experience was exactly what I thought that it would be based on over two pages of directions (plus references to two additional pages) for a filled cookie.  The recipe itself it not particularly hard, in the sense that a baker of moderate experience should have no difficulty making these, but it was very time consuming and used up quite a few more dishes than I really enjoy washing.  Basically, you make a cream cheese based dough, chill, roll out, and top with filling.  Then you roll up the dough, chill again (overnight), brush with an egg wash, slice, coat in a cinnamon/sugar/nut mixture, and bake.  From start to finish is about 14 hours and a ridiculous number of bowls and kitchenware, minimum.  Was it worth it?  Yes.  Absolutely.  For the time and trouble, you get more than three dozen very amazing pastries.  Would I do it again?  Perhaps for a special occasion, though truthfully, on special occasions I prefer recipes that take up less of my time, so that I can spend more time with my family or guests.

Here's a few pictures illustrating the process.  First, the apricot lekvar.

 Then the cinnamon/sugar mixture.

 Then the nuts.

 Then the fruit.  (Be sure to plump them by soaking them in hot water for about 10 minutes.  They will not become moist any other way.)

 Rolled up and ready to chill overnight. 

 After you paint the egg wash on, you slice and roll in the nut/cinnamon/sugar mixture.  The chilled rolls are very stiff, which made this part much easier than I originally thought. 







I did make one minor change to the recipe.  It said to roll the dough out to a 10x14" rectangle and then cut the long way to make two 5x14" rectangles to fill.  After looking over the amount of filling that I was supposed to put inside, I sliced my rectangle the other way to make two 10x7" rectangles.  Judging by the pictures on my fellow bakers' blogs, I made a good choice.  From my 7" width, I barely got a 1 1/2 times roll out of my dough as it was (which is what the color illustration in the cook book showed).  Several other bakers could barely get more than 1/4" overlap to seal the pastry from the 5" width.  I don't know if this is an error in the text or some sort of misunderstanding of the sheer amount of filling, but cutting the dough the other way worked for me. 

The bottom line:

On the plus side you have a chance to use up your assorted bits of fruits and nuts leftover from other recipes.  The recipe simply calls for 2 cups of "assorted dried fruits" and 3 1/2 cups "assorted nuts", which meant that when I was creating the filling, I could empty out lots of little bags of bits of things leftover from Christmas baking.  The rolls, once chilled, were much easier to cut and roll in the topping than I originally thought.  You also get to create something that is truly unique and extremely delicious.  

The minuses were primarily the time and complex nature of the recipe.  The rolling out of the dough and filling it was a bit on the obnoxious side.  You are supposed to chill the dough for two hours prior to rolling it out, but once it is soft enough to roll out, it becomes so soft that it is a little tricky to roll up once you've added the filling and almost impossible to pick up.  I used my dough scraper and a large pancake spatula to transfer the rolls to my sheet for chilling.  And frankly, I don't see any way around that.  Also... there were a lot of little bowls of stuff that had to be created separately and then layered onto the dough separately.  The bit of the recipe that Jessica forgot to post was for the Apricot Lekvar (which I can imagine could be substituted with a low-sugar preserve.  

          Apricot Lekvar 

          2 cups whole dried apricots

          1/4 cup packed light brown sugar

          1 1/2 tsp fresh lemon juice

          1/4 cup finely chopped toasted blanched almonds (I didn't add these, since the rolls 
          were already filled with nuts.)

          Put the apricots in a medium saucepan and cover with water.  Simmer for 10 minutes,
          or until the apricots are soft.  Process the apricots, brown sugar, and lemon juice in
          a food processor (I used my small electric nut chopper.) until you have a chunky
          spread, adding a bit of the cooking water from the apricots, as necessary, to provide
          a spreadable consistency.  (I really didn't need any.)  Stir in nuts, if desired.   

I loved the experience, but would be reluctant to make rugelach again any time soon.  Hopefully the next recipe (in two weeks) will be a little less time consuming.  

UPDATE:  When I went over to the Tuesdays With Dorie website to post my link, I noticed that quite a few bakers mentioned the expense as one of the downsides of baking rugelach.  I have to admit that I hadn't thought of that because as I posted above, I just used up bits of what was leftover from Christmas baking.  I thought of that as a plus rather than a minus because I hate throwing out half-used bags of expensive ingredients well past their prime.  I really only had to go pick up a package of dried apricots for the lekvar and 12 oz. of cream cheese.  Everything else was already in the pantry or fridge.  Still, if I had been in a position where I had to pick up all of the fruit and nuts for the filling, too--that admittedly might have been a deal breaker, budget-wise.  Something to consider.