The Slavic east and the Balkans · Volume 30, The Living Culture, the Roman Vein and the Rose Valley

Kürtőskalács

Name: Kürtőskalács
Total time: 1 h 30 min
Yield: Makes 4 to 6
Cuisine: Bulgaria and Romania
Ingredients: 500g flour, 1 egg plus 2 egg yolks, 90g sugar, 50g butter, 15g fresh yeast, 250ml warm milk, pinch of salt yeasted dough; 100g sugar, for rolling

Transylvania, Romania

Kürtőskalács, a Transylvanian spit-baked sugar-crusted pastry: a hollow golden brown cylinder of ribbed pastry with a deeply caramelised, glossy crackled sugar shell, standing upright on its end.

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time: 1 hour 30

Researched: No outside sources linked
Reviewed: Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked: Not yet cooked and reported

Transylvania, the spit-baked pastry this chapter had to correct rather than simply repeat.

by Transylvania, Romania

It also runs into the working assumption this project's own scoping brief made about kürtőskalács, the spit-baked, sugar-crusted pastry claimed by Prague's tourist trade as trdelník, and this research had to correct that assumption rather than confirm it. The earliest documented recipe, dated 1784, sits in the manuscript cookbook of Countess Mária Mikes of Zabola, a Székely Hungarian noblewoman, and contains no sugar at all, the sweet crust arriving later. The spit-roasting technique itself most likely did arrive via German, Austrian or Saxon transmission, related to Baumkuchen and the Transylvanian Saxon Baumstriezel, whose very name is a literal mirror-translation of "chimney cake," and a Transylvanian Hungarian noble writing in 1736 pointedly did not list kürtőskalács among traditional Hungarian foods, evidence read by Hungarian scholarship itself as confirming the dish began as a German import that Hungarian and Székely kitchens then took up and elaborated. The honest account, then, is neither "purely Hungarian" nor "a Transylvanian Saxon invention" as this project first assumed going in, but a Transylvanian dish born of both communities together, first written down by a Székely Hungarian hand. It belongs to this volume because Transylvania belongs to Romania, and Prague's trdelník, carrying its own Slovak protected-origin status at Skalica, is a separate, later story this chapter leaves for whichever volume eventually treats the Czech lands properly.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Makes 4 to 6. About 1.5 hours, including proving.

Ingredients

500g flour, 1 egg plus 2 egg yolks, 90g sugar, 50g butter, 15g fresh yeast, 250ml warm milk, pinch of salt yeasted dough
100g sugar, for rolling

Method

Wrap a yeasted dough in a ribbon around a wooden spit, the kürtő.
Roll in sugar.
Bake slowly over embers, turning constantly, until the sugar caramelises into a crisp shell around a soft, hollow interior.

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.

What a modern chef changes

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

About 1.5 hours

Method

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.
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.
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.
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.

Open in the atlas: cook mode, scaling and tick off lists