Strudel
Paper-thin pastry wrapped around sweet or savoury fillings and baked
Strudel is a rolled, baked pastry associated with Austria and Hungary, now enjoyed across Central Europe. It features an exceptionally thin dough folded over sweet fruits, curd cheese, or savoury vegetables and meats, eaten both on ordinary days and during seasonal celebrations.
- Oldest known recipes from 1696 include turnip and milk-cream strudel.
- The name comes from a Middle High German word meaning whirlpool.
- Dough is stretched by hand until transparent enough to read through.
- Modern Hebrew colloquially calls the @ email symbol a shtrudel.
What is Strudel?
Strudel is a Central European baked pastry formed by wrapping paper-thin dough around a plentiful filling. The word derives from an older German term for a whirlpool, describing the spiral pattern created when the rolled roll is sliced. While widely known as a dessert, strudel can be either sweet or savoury. The casing is light and delicate rather than rich and buttery like puff pastry. Sweet versions taste crisp, fruity, or gently creamy, depending on whether apples, cherries, or soft curds are enclosed inside. Savoury preparations tend to be hearty and spiced, often featuring shredded vegetables or minced meats.
Where does Strudel come from?
The pastry is thought to stem from Ottoman baklava, which influenced Hungarian bakers during Turkish rule to create rétes by layering tissue-thin dough. Strudel evolved into its spiral rolled format around the opening of the eighteenth century across the Austrian Empire. The two earliest recorded formulas appear in a handwritten cookbook from 1696 preserved in the Vienna City Hall library, describing turnip strudel alongside a milk-cream variation. Over subsequent decades, the baked specialty spread through the empire and became an established fixture of Austrian, German, Czech, and wider Central European cooking traditions.
How is Strudel made?
Traditional strudel dough relies on flour with high gluten, water, oil, and salt, omitting sugar completely. Bakers knead the mass thoroughly and let it rest so it gains extreme elasticity. The dough is pulled and stretched outward over the back of the hands until it turns see-through. Folk wisdom demands that one should easily read a letter or newspaper through the stretched sheet. The sheer dough is laid onto a clean cloth, spread with the selected mixture, and rolled up using the cloth to guide the coil. It is then transferred to an oven to bake until golden.
How and when is Strudel eaten?
Strudel features across Central Europe as an everyday bake and a celebratory centrepiece. In Hungary, people share it during the carnival season of Farsang and at New Year to welcome longevity and good fortune. Observant Ashkenazi Jewish households prepare oil-dough strudels for the holidays of Purim and Simchat Torah, pairing the pastry with festive drinks. Cabbage-filled rolls have historically served as savoury fare in Austrian, Hungarian, and Swiss Jewish tables, though unsuspecting travellers have occasionally ordered them expecting a sugary treat.
Kinds of Strudel
The most famous sweet varieties feature spiced tart apples, soft quark cheese, or milk-soaked bread cubes known as Millirahmstrudel. Other sweet fillings include sour cherries, walnuts, poppy seeds, apricots, plums, and rice pudding. Savoury options range across braised cabbage seasoned with caraway and onions, mashed potato, sauerkraut, spinach, pumpkin, and meat fillings like minced lung. In Hungary, sweet curd with raisins, walnuts, and sour cherries dominate the rétes repertoire. South Tyrol in northern Italy legally protects the pastry as a traditional regional food specialty.
What Strudel means
Beyond the dining table, strudel holds a fond place in regional folklore. Hungarian children sing traditional ring-dance nursery rhymes about coiling like a rétes snake. In modern Hebrew, everyday speech nicknames the email at-sign a shtrudel because the symbol mimics the coiled cross-section of the pastry, while official Hebrew terminology gives the sign the title keruchit from the same pastry name.
When Strudel is on the table
Questions people ask about Strudel
Where does strudel come from?
Strudel developed within the Austrian Empire around 1700, descending from Hungarian rétes and earlier Ottoman pastry techniques. The earliest known handwritten recipes from 1696 are kept in Vienna.
What is strudel made of?
Traditional strudel dough uses high-gluten flour, water, salt, and vegetable oil without sugar. It is stretched very thin and wrapped around fillings such as apples, sweet curd cheese, sour cherries, or savoury braised cabbage.
Is strudel always sweet?
No. While sweet fruit and cheese fillings are famous, savoury strudels filled with cabbage, potatoes, pumpkin, sauerkraut, or seasoned meats are traditional across Central Europe and Ashkenazi Jewish cooking.
Good reading and sources
The facts on this page come from the Wikipedia article "Strudel", written by its contributors and used under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence, and from its Wikidata record (CC0). EveryThali rewrote the text in its own words, with AI assistance, and compares every page with the article to make sure no passage is copied. It may be reused under the same CC BY-SA 4.0 licence with a link back.
It may contain mistakes, and it is not dietary or allergy advice: recipes differ from cook to cook. If something is wrong, tell us. Last refreshed 2026-10-04.
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