Kürtőskalács

Székelyföld, and now every fair in Hungary

Illustration

A chimney cake: yeast dough wound on a wooden cylinder and turned over embers until the sugar is a gold brown shell. The 1784 recipe has no sugar, the sugar is from the late nineteenth century, and the dispute of 2015 is in the history. It is made by cue. The dough is Pénzcentrum's recipe of 2023; no source we found gives the bake time or the sugar for rolling, and the Székely National Museum's study of it could not be read, so the method is as the Hungarian pages give it.

by Székelyföld, and now every fair in Hungary

The first known recipe for kürtőskalács is in the Transylvanian cookbook of Mária Mikes of Zabola, 1784, "Porániné módja szerint kürtős kaláts", and it has no sugar; crystal sugar became general in the Székely and Saxon villages only in the late nineteenth century with the first Transylvanian sugar factories. By the mid twentieth century it was baked almost only in Székelyföld; after 1990 it spread everywhere. It entered the Hungarian Value Register on 29 January 2015 and became a hungarikum on 3 December 2015. The dispute that reached us is a Hungarian one. The Háromszék daily of Sfântu Gheorghe reported in January 2015 that the researcher Péter Hantz, who had pressed for European protection, said the Hungarian Ministry of Agriculture obstructed him, and that a rival applicant, the Magyar Pékek Fejedelmi Rendje, holder of a trademark since 2010, had submitted material to the Hungarikum Committee that mentioned neither Székelyföld nor Transylvania. The Transylvanian Saxons called it Schornsteinkuchen, a straight translation; the Czech trdlo and the Slovak trdelník are named as relatives; no Czech, Slovak, Saxon or Romanian source was read. The Székely National Museum's own study of it, in Acta Siculica, reached us as unreadable image data.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Makes several. Made by cue, the bake by the colour of the sugar.

Ingredients

Kürtőskalács is made by cue, the ribbon turned over embers until the sugar is a gold brown shell; no source we found gives the sugar for rolling by weight, and the Székely museum's study could not be read, so the method is as the Hungarian pages give it.

500g plain flour, for the dough
100ml milk, lukewarm
50g butter, in the dough
2 eggs
2 tbsp granulated sugar, in the dough
20g fresh yeast
50g melted butter or lard, for brushing
as needed granulated sugar, for rolling
as needed ground walnut or cinnamon sugar, to finish

Method

Make the sweet yeast dough of flour, milk, butter, egg, sugar and yeast, and let it rise.
Roll it thin and cut it into a long ribbon.
Wind the ribbon round a wooden cylinder about 25 to 30 centimetres long, edge to edge, and roll it on a board to press the seams.
Brush with the melted butter or lard and roll in sugar.
Turn it over embers, steadily, until the sugar has caramelised to a gold brown shell and the dough is baked through.
Slide it off the cylinder, roll in walnut or cinnamon sugar, and pull it apart in rings while it is hot.

What a modern chef changes

The cylinder in a domestic oven, which is an adaptation and is called one

Rung 5

Method

Wind the ribbon on a rolling pin wrapped in foil and bake at 200 degrees, turning every 4 minutes, for 16 to 20; the ember is the tradition and the oven is the stand in.
Weigh the sugar on: 40 grams a cake, rolled on twice, once before and once halfway.
Finish 1 minute under a hot grill for the glaze the embers give.
Serve within ten minutes. It does not keep, and it was never meant to.

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