Houston We Have A Problem!

Many of you may recognize the title line from the Movie “Apollo 13”. Well I am sure that you can tell by using that line to start this post that the strudel baking ran into a bit of a snag. Let’s just say that Ettie and Molly are probably in heaven saying “Bless his heart, he tried, but he has a ways to go before he is considered a strudel cook”.

The strudel preparation started out a little rocky, I put on the satellite radio to have some music on while I worked my culinary charms. I put it on the Classic Rewind station and the first song that came on was Meatloaf’s “Two out of Three Ain’t Bad”. Most of you know by now Meatloaf’s “Bat Out of Hell” was one of Jennifer’s favorite albums. I got a little teary but it made me really felt her presence with me during the making of the strudel. They followed that with “Bat Out Of Hell”.

I did like that feeling of her here with me in the trenches, other than the critique on some of my techniques (which believe me I heard in my head numerous times during this prep).

I know one thing for sure that neither Ettie or Molly dirtied as many dishes and appliances as I did putting this damn strudel together (another criticism I heard in my head). My kitchen looked like a tornado came thru for a bit. I have it pretty well cleaned up now. All I can say is thank god for dish washers.

My neighbors probably think I should dust more often, because I took the cloth that I used to roll the strudel on out in the back yard and shook all the excess flour off of it and it looked like a snow storm, so maybe I put a little too much flour on the cloth (one of the many critiques that I heard, Damn it Joe that is took much flour). I am one of those guys that if a little bit is good a bit more doesn’t hurt. Learned that one from my Dad.

Anyway, I thought I had it pretty well planned out, and for the most part I did, however, I needed to make a few adjustments on the fly, which added to the dish count but it got made.

The dough preparation went pretty well, while it was resting I started on the apple peeling and coring, that went fine. Then I’m broke out the trusty old Salad shooter (yes I know I am showing my age, many probably don’t even remeber what the salad shooter is) to do the grating of the apples. This resulted in the first on the fly adjustment.

I used Granny Smith apples for this apple strudel. I know these are not the best choice, but they were the best looking apples in the produce section when I was doing the purchasing. So anyway the first couple of slices went thru the salad shooter just fine, but then they did not and started just turning to mush instead of grated apple. I had to go old school and break out the manual grater. That slowed down the prep a little bit and added to the dish count. One of the disadvantage of Granny Smith’s is they have a high water content. Now I accounted for this and I did not grate them over the dough (like you normally would) I grated them into a bowl and then I put the grated apples in a fine mesh strainer and squeezed out as much of the water as I could. Then I put them into another bowl (adding to that dish count) to add the sugar and spices. Granny Smith’s are also a little tart so I wanted to sugar and spice them up before I put them on the dough. So that part went OK.

Then I took the dough out of the warm oven where I had it resting while getting everything else prepped. I had my cloth on the table and I added just the right amount of flour, thank you very much!

I got it rolled out into a nice circlular shape and I commenced the stretching part. Ideally you want to stretch to dough to paper thin, you should be able to read a newspaper if it was under the dough and it is stretched right. Well let’s just say I did not get mine that thin. I fought with it for a while, but we were getting in the danger zone of the dough getting to cool. So I pulled a “it’s good enough” (even though my spiritual baking partner said it was not).

I got my melted butter and coated it up and put my mushy grated spiced apple mix on it. I trimmed the thick edges off the dough. I then commenced the rolling process and that part went ok. Now another tricky part is getting the rolled strudel into the pan.

That did not goes as smooth as I had it planned, but I got it done without covering the whole house in flour. Ok maybe she was right!

Well I got in the oven and the first 15 minutes things were looking promising, but sometime in the next 35 minutes is when the “Houston, we have a problem” arose. The seam of the last roll was on the top (which I did not notice) and it came loose and I had some blow outs of the dough. I am feeling it was due to the inconsistencies of my dough thickness.

Like Uncle Eddie in Christmas vacation, I did a little taste test of the crashed strudel. The flavor profile was decent and the texture was Ok, but the dough just did not pass muster as evidenced by the multiple blow outs.

Needless to say, I hope either Smiths or Walmart has some apple pies left, because I can’t take this disaster to someone else’s house.

I know Jennifer is having a good laugh in heaven and a “I told you” moment. As usual, she was right, but I give myself a solid B for effort. Well as soon as the dishwasher gets into drying mode, I will be making a Apple pie run.