One of my favorite pastries during autumn and christmas time. The dough recipe is super simple, though the process is not that easy to get right. If you want to prepare this for a special occasion, rather try it a few days in advance just to be sure.

Ingredients

Dough:

• 4 egg yolks
• 125g sour cream
• (2g salt)
• 250g wheat flour (read instructions!)

To fry:

• 750g coconut fat

Topping:

• powdered sugar
• cinnamon

Dough Consistency

The consistency of the dough is very important. You want to be able to roll out the dough as thin as possible, without it sticking too the table. However, you do not want to use too much flour, or the taste and mouth feel will suffer drastically.

The dough in the pictures was made with 280g wheat baking flour (ger: “doppelgriffig”). This was a bad choice! The dough was close to a pasta dough and hard to cut. It did not stick to the table at all, though it resulted in way too thick pastries. When done correctly Strauben just ‘melt’ on your tong, though those did not. They tasted a bit stale.

Reducing the flour does help, though makes the process a bit more tricky as the dough is more wet and will stick a bit more. You can go with a wetter dough and use some flour when rolling it out. Note however that additional flour sticking to the dough stripes will come off during frying and will slowly burn in the oil. So you might not be able to reuse the oil for another batch.

Update: Using 250g universal wheat flour did the trick. The dough was a bit wet and sticky. By very very gently flouring the table rolling out was pretty easy and the result was amazing.

Instructions

Topping: Mix a few tablespoons of powdered sugar with ca. one teaspoon of cinnamon. Depending on how much cinnamon you want to have in there add more or less, its totally up to you.

Slowly melt the oil in a small pot over low heat.

For the dough mix all ingredients together. Start with 250g flour, not more. Rather add some more afterward if you need to. Divide the dough into four portions. Roll out one part at a time as thin as possible and cut it into slices.

Wait until the fat reached a good temperature. Add a small piece of dough to the oil and wait until it starts bubbling. Add another piece of dough. After 2-3 minutes turn it up side down. You want to see some light color on the second piece. If it takes longer, let the oil heat up a bit more. Potentially you can increase the temperature to medium heat. Note however that you do not want to heat the fat too much. The higher the temperature the faster you excess flour in the oil will burn, making the fat unusable.

Once the oil has the right temperature (2-3 minutes to get some color on one side) it is time to form the Strauben. To do so, twist and loop the dough stripes around itself. Note that they will unfold in the oil a bit. They should not unfold totally as they will break too easily, though you do not want to have a very tight knot either as this would reduce the surface where the sugar can stick too much.

Add a few of them into the oil. Do not add too much as they usually unfold and otherwise would stick to each other. After 2-3 minutes (or until very lightly golden on the underside) turn all of them. Let them fry for another 2 minutes before removing them from the oil and letting them rest on a paper towel for a bit.

I usually form and add the next batch at this point. While this one is frying, I remove the previous one from the paper towel to another plate and use a fine sieve to sugar coat them with the sugar cinnamon mix. Do this from all sides, you want to cover as much of the surface with sugar as possible.

Do not forget to check the status of the frying batch and turn them once golden. If they are a bit darker you might want to sugarcoat them but store them in separate so you can ensure that they still taste ok. In case you really burned them you might want to use new coconut fat or all other batches will also taste burned.

Tips

Strauben should be stored super dry. If you store them openly they will get soft and you do not want that to happen. Place them on a plate and wrap them in a plastic bag. While you could store them for quite a while they do taste best the first or second day after frying them.