Kürtőskalács

As tradition built it

Makes 3 large. The dough rises about half an hour.

Ingredients

The dough

• 1 kg flour, at warm room temperature
• 30 g yeast
• 12 tbsp icing sugar
• ½ litre milk
• 2 eggs
• 4 egg yolks
• 8 to 10 g salt
• 12 tbsp melted butter
• 1 lemon, zest grated
• a little oil

To bake

• as needed warm lard or oil, for the spits
• as needed melted lard, for brushing
• as needed granulated sugar, for rolling

To finish

• to serve walnuts, desiccated coconut, cinnamon

Method

1. Start the yeast with 2 tbsp of the icing sugar and a little milk.
2. Add it to the flour with everything else and knead well, until the dough blisters.
3. Oil the top and leave it somewhere warm to rise, about half an hour.
4. Roll it into ropes the thickness of a little finger.
5. Grease the wooden spits with warm lard or oil and wind the dough round them.
6. Brush with melted lard and roll thickly in granulated sugar.
7. Bake over embers, turning, until reddish brown.
8. Take it off the spit while hot and sprinkle with walnuts, coconut or cinnamon.

Notes

The earliest documented recipe, 1784, in the manuscript cookbook of the Székely Hungarian noblewoman Countess Mária Mikes of Zabola, contains no sugar at all, the sweet crust a later addition; the spit-roasting technique itself most likely arrived by way of German or Austrian Saxon transmission, a Transylvanian dish born of two communities together rather than the invention of either one alone.

The method is Rozália Orbán's, of Rozi Erdélyi konyhája, and Erdélyi Receptek Székelyföldről gives the same quantities; it rolls and cuts the strips, brushes with egg, and leaves out the lemon. Neither gives a baking time.

What a modern chef changes

A rotisserie ember roast, a laminated dough and a rose petal sugar

About 1.5 hours

Method

1. Roast on the Big Green Egg's rotisserie attachment, held at a genuinely low, even, controlled heat over real embers, closer to the traditional open-fire method than any electric spit.
2. Laminate the dough with cold butter before winding it onto the spit, a genuine departure that gives extra flake within the traditional soft, chewy interior.
3. Finish the sugar crust with a brief torch pass for an even, glass-hard shell, crème brûlée style, rather than relying on the fire alone for caramelisation.
4. Dust the finished pastry with a dehydrated, ground rose petal sugar from the Kazanlak valley in place of plain crystal sugar, one small deliberate crossing of this chapter's Bulgarian and Romanian halves at its close.