Curd cheese dumplings filled with a strawberry in a sweetened bread crumb crust. One of my favorite austrian dishes/desserts of all times.

Ingredients

One person main dish or 3 person dessert:

Dumplings

• 250g curd cheese (20% fat)
• 1 egg
• 25g bread crumb (ca. 3 heaped tbsp)
• 30g wheat semolina (ca. 3 tbsp)
• 10g vanilla sugar (ca. 1 tbsp)
• pinch of salt
• strawberries

Crust

• 25g butter
• 50g (?) bread crumb
• 10g sugar
• two pinches of cinnamon

Instructions

Crust

Melt the butter in a pan. Once it stops bubbling (but is not brown yet!) add the bread crumb. Let the pan heat up under constant (!!!) stirring until the crumbs get brownish before adding the sugar. Remove the pan from the stove once the crumbs are golden brown. Do not stop stirring (especially with a good heavy pan that keeps the heat up).

Dumplings

Mix all ingredients for the dumplings together (except the strawberries of course) and let it rest for 1h in the fridge. The rest is optional but it will make forming the dumplings easier.

Wash the strawberries and cut of the green and potentially its pointy end to get it in a somewhat round shape. Get some dough in one hand and press the strawberry in with the other. Fully cover the strawberry with the dough and start rolling the dumpling in your hands. Once satisfied, roll the dumpling in flour and set it aside during forming the other ones.

Preheat water close to boiling. Note that the water should not boil when you put the dumplings in as this might rip them apart. Once the dumplings are in, twist the pot in fast alternating clock and counter clockwise motions so the dumplings don’t stick to the bottom for a few times during the first minutes. Note that stirring them with a spoon might also rip them open. Cover the pot and let them cook close below boiling temperature. Depending on the size of your dumplings, they should be done in about 10 to 15 minutes.

Once they are done, get them out one by one and place them in the sweetened bread crumbs. Try to not get a lot of water into the crumbs during that step.

Tips

This does of course also work with other fruits, preferable apricots, plums or strawberries.

You can top the dumplings with sugar, though I prefer to top them with more sweetened crumbs instead.