Quark Strudel

When you have an excess of quark on your hands you need to bake something. Quark is a German curd cheese, so to maintain the German theme a strudel seems an appropriated choice. The pastry surrounding a strudel is traditionally stretched until it’s papery thin. Obviously this requires elasticity in the dough, and without gluten elasticity is hard to achieve. This means that making a gluten free strudel is a challenge.

A recent Daring Bakers’ challenge suggested a strudel dough should be so thin you can see the pattern of your tablecloth through it. Lorraine’s photos show that she achieved this amazing feat, so it must be possible (at least if you use wheat flour). Gluten free strudel dough is less accommodating, and mine was certainly not the 2 feet square that the recipe prescribes. It wasn’t see-through either. The tablecloth was only visible where the dough was torn.

When I was rolling up the strudel, the fragile dough burst dramatically, and the quark filling began to ooze out. In the nick of time I remembered my mother’s habit of baking strudels in pyrex dishes, and my gooey strudel was saved. It was ugly, but delicious. If you want to enjoy a quark strudel while avoiding the trials of strudel pastry you could use frozen puff pastry instead. Since this isn’t an option for a gluten free strudel, you could consider making gluten free shortcrust rather than a true strudel pastry. If quark is hard to find you can make homemade quark like I did.

Even though it isn’t pretty, exploded quark strudel tastes good. James actually preferred the strudel to the quark cake I made earlier. The filling isn’t too sweet, so the sultanas have a chance to shine against the lemony background. This filling is so delicious and creamy I would happily eat it with a spoon. This would conveniently avoid the bursting pastry problem too. The combination of quark, citrus and dried fruit is beautiful, and I’m already scheming about a version with orange and currants in place of lemon and sultanas.

Ingredients for the dough
200 g gluten free plain flour
1/8 tsp salt
30 mL olive oil
105 mL water
1/2 tsp vinegar

Ingredients for the filling
~1/2 cup almond meal (for sprinkling)
250-300 g quark
1/4 cup caster sugar
1 egg (lightly beaten)
grated rind 1 lemon
1/2 cup of sultanas (soaked in hot water or rum)

Method
1. Combine the flour and salt, in the bowl of a mixer. Pour in the combined liquid ingredients while mixing the dough. The mixture should come together in a ball, you may need to add a little water to achieve this.
2. Change to the dough hook and knead the dough for a few minutes into a slightly rough ball.
3. Rest the pastry in the fridge overnight.

Next day
4. Prepare the filling by combining the quark, caster sugar, egg, lemon rind and drained sultanas.
5. Then roll out the dough. Flour a clean tablecloth and use your floured hands to spread the strudel dough. It should be able to stretch to 2 feet square, or until you can see through it.
6. Sprinkle the dough with almond meal to absorb excess liquid from the filling.
7. Make a line of quark filling at one end of the strudel dough. Then use the cloth to help you roll the strudel up. The weight of the filling should allow it to roll up if you raise one end of the cloth. You will also need to fold in the sides of the dough to ensure the filling doesn’t fall out the end of the roll.
8. Turn your strudel from the cloth into a casserole dish, or onto a baking tray (if it has enough structural integrity).
9. Bake at 200 ^∘C for 30 minutes until lightly brown at the edges.
10. Serve warm.

Homemade Quark

Ask an English speaker about quark and they’re likely to tell you it’s a physics term that refers to some kind of subatomic particle. Murray Gell-Mann, who won a Nobel prize for his theory about quarks, chose the name because it was a nonsense word. He found it in James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake, where “Three quarks for Muster Mark” sounds rather poetic, even if it’s somewhat unintelligible.

A German speaker tends to have a truer love of quark, because in German quark refers to a curd cheese. It’s used to make cheesecakes and dips, which are much easier to appreciate than subatomic particles (for me at least). Eating quark cake was one of James’ favourite experiences in Germany, so when he came back my challenge was to make one. In Sydney quark is difficult to find, and only turns up at a few speciality delis. The other way to get quark is to make it yourself.

Searching the internet for quark recipes gives a few results, but they’re almost entirely in German and the methods vary. Luckily my German friend came to the rescue and found a reliable quark recipe. It had a nice scientific explanation of quark making, which included tips like avoiding UHT milk, and how to turn the whey into a refreshing drink.

A few attempts later my friend was satisfied with her quark. Her experiments showed that sour cream was not a good starter culture, but that a buttermilk starter produces the right level of sourness in the quark. A few days later she arrived at work with a container of curds and whey for me to try!

The recipe for quark is simple, with only two ingredients, milk and buttermilk. The buttermilk is the starter, so make sure you have the real cultured variety. The bacterial culture in the buttermilk makes the acids that produce your curd. UHT milk can’t be used because the high temperature treatment (135 ^∘C rather than 72 ^∘C for pasteurisation) can alter the proteins and sugars which the bacteria feed on. Once the culture is started the curds and whey take around 24 hours to separate. Then the curd can be strained out to make quark.

The quark can be used to make cheesecakes (such as this quark cake), to fill strudels and in dips. And the leftover whey? Well my instructions recommended making it into a refreshing drink by adding lemon juice and sugar. The whey drink isn’t great, but the quark is really something special. Muster Mark was pretty lucky to get three quarks, especially if they were quark cakes not subatomic particles.

Homemade Quark (Curd Cheese)

Ingredients
1/2 cup cultured buttermilk
3 1/2 cups full cream milk

Method
1. If your milk is not pasteurised you should bring it to the boil, then allow it to cool to room temperature (covered with a lid).
2. Stir the buttermilk into the milk in a container you can cover, or make the mixture in the insert of your yoghurt incubator.
3. Put the container in your incubator, or wrap it in a towel and keep it in a warm place. One option is to preheat the oven to 50 ^∘C and turn it off before placing the container inside.
4. Allow the culture to proceed for ~24 hours, or until the curds and whey separate. At first the milk will look grainy, and eventually the curds will float on the whey. The grainy stage is probably sufficient, but might give a lower yield.
5. Dampen a clean tea towel and use it to line a sieve. Place the sieve over a basin. Pour the curds and whey into the strainer. Bring the tea towel together so that it covers your quark and do it up with a rubber band. Place the entire draining apparatus in the fridge.
6. Allow to drain in the fridge overnight, or for 24 hours. The drained quark should have a consistency similar to sour cream, but it has a more sour taste.

Ziggy’s Cafe

Ziggy’s Cafe is just off the food court at Broadway Shopping Centre. We went there for a meal before a movie. We were cutting it fine to fit in dinner before our session, so it was lucky the service was fairly fast. The outstanding thing about this place is the size of the servings. In a location like a food court I thought mains around $20 was pretty steep, but with the size of the serves you don’t need a meal per person. Sharing dishes with a pizza between every two people and an entree to share gave us more than enough food.

We started with drinks, although not the whiskey that the waiter jokingly suggested. He must have thought we were too much of a gaggle of girlies for strong drinks and he was right. Both the lemon lime and bitters and the hot chocolate were quite sweet. The sugar provided with the hot chocolate was definitely superfluous. We decided to order some pizzas to share and a vegetarian nachos as entree in case the pizzas weren’t enough. I ordered a pumpkin risotto. This, along with the nachos and steak, were the only meals that were gluten free, giving me pretty limited options. They aren’t labelled on the menu either, which is a pity, but I was relieved not to be eating yet another steak.

Everything arrived at about the same time and dispelled our doubts about whether we’d have enough food. The nachos was a full scale meal with heaps of topping, cheese, sour cream, salsa and corn chips. It wasn’t your standard refried beans, the range of vegetables made it feel almost healthy (although the other ingredients more than cancel out a few veggies!). The slightly spicy sauce featured corn kernels as well as beans which I quite enjoyed.

My risotto had plenty of mixed herbs, although it suffered from the common risotto problem of tasting very uniform. It was the biggest serve of risotto I’ve ever seen and I wasn’t able to finish it. This was partly because I was busy eating the nachos, which was nicer than the risotto, but I don’t think I could have got through it even with a dedicated effort.

The report on the pizzas was good. Everyone commented on the softness of the bases. They were thin but soft, a balance the pizza eaters approved of. The gamberi eaters were happy with their prawns.

The prettier pizza was the prima vera which featured chicken and avocado. One taste tester reported that she liked the way all the tastes were distinct from one another.

So what was the verdict? The food at Ziggy’s is nothing special, but the serving sizes are enormous. It’s not a bad option for dinner before a movie if you want to avoid the bustle of the food court outside.

Ratings (out of 5 snorts)

Price	3 snorts
Taste	3 snorts
Service	3 snorts
Atmosphere	2 snorts

Ziggy’s Cafe
Broadway Shopping Centre
Level 2 Foodcourt
1 Bay St, Broadway

Gasparo

Gasparo in Burwood is a nice little restaraunt that we discovered by accident. My mother and I were intending to visit Bello, another Burwood restaurant I have been told is very good, but it was closed on Mondays so we wandered up the street and discovered Gasparo. This was our second visit to introduce the rest of the family to the little gem we had discovered. I had the chicken snitzel with mushroom sauce, which is served with salad and chips. I have to say, the mushroom sauce is made of awesome. According to the waiter, who was very friendly although a bit rushed, it is freshly squeezed from the awesome tree out the back! The chicken snitzel is one of the better snitzels I’ve ever had, with the chicken staying nice and moist, lightly crumbed and not to greasy. It’s the sauce which raises it out of the ordinary- it’s also handy for dipping your chips in (they end up as a shovel for the mushroom sauce). Sadly the chef ignored my request for naked salad, but the dressing was nice enough, not oily and not too strong. With a table of 9 I didn’t get to find out what everyone thought of their dishes, but Bryn thought his salmon with garlic and dill sauce was del-ish-ous! James was dissapointed in his meal (unfortunately I didn’t catch what it was) but I think that was mainly because we’d talked the place up so much and he was expecting ambrosia. Apparently Loina had the same meal and she really enjoyed it. No accounting for taste!

The main event was coming up- dessert! The whole point of this exercise (well maybe not the WHOLE point) was to sample Gasparo’s rather unusual sticky date pudding. If you ask me it’s more of a cake than a pudding- it looks like a cake in the cake window. But when they heat it and serve it with icecream, the icing melts into this incredible butterscotch sauce so the whole thing becomes warm and moistly delicious. On this occasion though, Gasparo failed us a bit, which takes it down some points in my estimation. Since this was a particular focus of the meal, my mother had rung ahead and specifically asked them to make sure they had plenty of it for that night (we’d booked). When it came time for dessert, there were only two serves. Since we’d specifically asked ahead of time, I feel this was pretty poor. Still the two serves were as delicious as promised, and the unlucky ones were quite satisfied with their mudcake and tiramisu.

 

On the whole, Gasparo is a pretty nice restaurant. It’s not too noisy, the decoration is subtle, the food reliably good with occasional flashes of awesome, and our waiter was a delight.

Cafe Gasparo
130 Burwood Rd
Burwood
NSW, Australia 

Ratings (out of 5 snorts)

Price	3 snorts
Taste	4 snorts
Service	3 snorts
Atmosphere	3 snorts