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Strudel Dough
Appears in
Published 1990
To the average home cook, the phenomenon of stretching a shapeless piece of dough until it is thin and transparent and covers a large surface area would seem all but impossible. Fortunately, just the opposite is true. Over the course of the past ten years, I have seen hundreds of students who had never previously prepared strudel dough make the dough from scratch and pull it successfully with a minimum of effort.
The success of a batch of strudel dough depends on one important factor: gluten. Formed by the change in structure of certain proteins in the flour when they encounter moisture and friction, the gluten is present in the dough in the form of elastic strands. Aggressive kneading and working of the dough during the initial stage of mixing causes a strong gluten to form — essential to a good strudel dough. While the dough is resting, the springy elasticity formed during kneading relaxes, though the webbed structure of the strands remains intact; it is these strands that enable the dough to be stretched more than paper-thin without tearing.