About Rugelach and a Rugelach Recipe
Rugelach (pronounced rug-a-la-kh) are pastry-like cookies that are typically enjoyed on the Jewish sabbath. However, they can be enjoyed all year round and on every day of the week. Rugelach is a Yiddish word meaning “little twists”. These pastries derive from Eastern Europe. They were traditionally made strictly with cheese, but today’s variations of rugelach can be found in many dairy-free versions.
You don’t need an excuse to enjoy some freshly baked rugelach. Especially with all the flavors to choose from, you can’t go wrong.
Chocolate Rugelach is a crowd favorite. You can get them dairy and fill your rugelach with milk chocolate. Or you can enjoy your rugelach after your Shabbos meal by adding pareve or dark chocolate and by substituting margarine for butter in your pastry.
Cinnamon Rugelach are also a favorite. These are especially mouthwatering to bake when the aromas from the cinnamon start to spread throughout your kitchen.
Apricot Rugelach are probably the most common fruit flavored rugelach pastries available. There is something about the sweetness of the dough with the tanginess of the apricot that makes it a delicious combination.
Raspberry Rugelach are a nice alternative to the common chocolate and cinnamon rugelach types. They go great with a cup of fruit flavored tea.
A rugelach platter is a great way to show somebody that you care. It can celebrate the birth of a baby, a recent marriage, or as a holiday gift.
It is pretty easy to make rugelach . There is no wrong way to eat Rugelach. Rugelach can be enjoyed straight from the oven or right out of the store. They can be crunchy or chewy, with nuts or without. The choice is yours
Full Rugelach Recipe Transcript
Hi, I’m Sean Farrell. I recently graduated from the Culinary Institute of America with my Bachelors Degree in Baking and Pastry Arts Management. After graduation, I took advantage of one of the CIA’s wonderful opportunities by interning with Chef Francisco Migoya at the Apple Pie Bakery Café. Today, we are going to make one of my favourite cookies, Rugelach. The first step is to make the filling. We are going to start with toasting out pecans. Now, it’s important to toast the pecans because it tends to bring out the oils in the nuts giving more flavour sort of filling. Rugelach is a traditional Eastern European treat, celebrated during the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah. In Yiddish, Rugelach means â little twists. I can tell my pecans are done toasting by the smell in the air, so I’m going to transfer them to a food processor. To this, we are going to add a small amount of chocolate and raspberry jam. To create a paste with all these ingredients in order to make our filling for our Rugelach, you know, you have the right texture for your paste when the mixture starts to pull away from the sides. Now, we’ll set this mixture aside while we make our dough. The first thing we do to make the dough is to sift all of our dry ingredients. We are going to take salt and I’ll put it in this flour. Well, it’s important to sift to make sure we get all the lumps out of the flour and make sure we aerate it as well. After we sift our flour and our salt, the next step is to cream the cream cheese and butter. We know when our mixture is creamed when the mixture is light in color. Take our sifted ingredients and add it into our. I added all of our dry ingredients at once. Now, we are just going to mix the mixture until it comes together. We know it’s ready when the mixture pulls off the sides, using a rubber spatula, just scrape the mixture off of the pedal making sure to scrape down the sides as well. Take our finished dough and wrap it in plastic and refrigerate for at least an hour. I’m shaping it into a rectangle because later, we are going to perform what we call a threefold in order to have our flaky layers in our Rugelach. The dough has been chilling for at least an hour.
So now we are going to take it out of the refrigerator and roll it out and perform a what we call threefold. Now, it’s important that we work with the floured surface. Keep in mind that we need to keep a rectangular shape in order to perform threefold. Now, the filing that we used, even though we used chocolate, pecans and raspberry jam, use anything, from marzipan, to apricot jam, walnuts or just plain cinnamon sugar. The reasoning for performing the threefold is to make sure that all the butter and the cream cheese are incorporated into the layer of the dough. This is going to give us a final texture that’s flakey and a beautiful cookie. Now, if your dough cracks, just press it together lightly with your fingers. We are going to roll our dough well, just until it’s about little less than an inch thick. Now, I am going to take my and just straighten out the sides. As you can see, I am being careful to keep our rectangle shape. Now, to perform a threefold just think of how you fold a letter: one, two, three. On one side, and two. Straighten up the sides again. Now, we are going to wrap it out in plastic wrap and chill it again for another hour.
So, an hour has gone by. We have our chilled three-folded dough. Using our divide this into three potions. As you can see, we have our nice flakey layers. We have one, two, three. With the rolling pin, roll this out until it’s around a quarter inch thick. So once my dough’s about a quarter inch thick, I am going to take a ten inch room. If you don’t have one of these, just use a large mixing bowl. Brush off on flour, take our filling, putting about a quarter of it on to the surface of the dough. Mixing down lightly. Spread the mixture as thinly as you possibly can, leaving about an inch circumference around the edge with the dough. And you can also use your hands as well. We are going to take some cinnamon sugar and sprinkler it lightly on the surface. Divide our circle into either 12 or 16 triangles. The easiest way to do that is to start from the centre and divide our circle into four quarters. And it doesn’t have to be 16 triangles; it can be however big as you want it to be. For instance, we’ll take this slice and simply take the widest base and roll it forward, similar to how you shape . Now, Rugelach is a very simply cookie to make. Our dough has butter and pink cheese in it. So you need to take care in making sure that the dough is nicely chilled, otherwise your dough will become sticky and hard to shape. Once we’ve finished rolling out all of our Rugelach, we want to transfer them to a parchment lined baking sheet or lightly sprayed baking sheep , making sure that we have a good amount of space in between each cookie, to allow for even spread. Have a small amount of egg wash here, that we’re just going to top of each cookie. Now we egg wash the cookies because they are going to give us a nice brown color on the surface. After we egg wash our cookies, we are going to sprinkle small amount of cinnamon sugar on the surface and transfer them to a pre-heated oven to 375 degrees and bake them for about 25 to 30 minutes or until they are golden brown. After about 25 minutes, I am taking the last batch out of the oven. As you can see, they have a beautiful crescent shape and a nice golden color. A little bit of sheen, that’s from the cinnamon sugar. And it’s important to put this on wire rack. It helps to make sure that the bottoms of the cookies don’t get too soggy.
You can find this recipe and many others in CIA’s Baking at Home with the Culinary Institute of America,
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