Oh yes! ‘Tis the season for crab. At least the season for Blue Crab – if you can find them. (see photo below) No, that is a Dungeness crab pictured here. I suppose if you had to, you could use the Dungeness. So a little twist on the standard apple, or fruit, strudel. Let’s try a Crab Strudel with a Salmon Pasta Salad. Robin directed me on how to make the salad. It’s one she “dreamed” up. There is no recipe as such.
For the strudel, probably the most difficult part is finding the garlic scapes. What? From Mother Earth News,
…The scapes are the flower stems that garlic plants produce before the bulbs mature. Growers often remove the scapes to push the plant’s energy toward bigger bulbs, and when harvested while they are young and tender, the scapes are delicious.
And from About (dot) com,
Many gardeners simply toss their scapes in the compost, but garlic scapes are both edible and delicious, as are the bulbils. Along the same lines, young garlic plants that are pulled to thin a row are referred to as “green garlic”. Used in the same manner as green onions, these too make excellent eating.
Here is how we made the Crab Strudel. You can get the recipe above. Cheers and have fun with this.
The Green Onion and Garlic have been diced. The garlic scapes are going to be diced.
The crab has been mixed with the parsley, lime juice, sea salt and Tellicherry pepper.
Cooking the green onion/garlic scape mixture.
Mix the crab mixture with the cooked green onion/garlic scape mixture.
Brush the phyllo dough – single sheet – with butter and lightly dust with fresh bread crumbs. Handling the phyllo dough can be a challenge. Take your time and make sure the sheets are cold, but not frozen.
1″ wide row of the crab mixture is placed on the phyllo dough. Roll into a “tube” carefully.
The strudel is rolled, placed on a parchment lined baking sheet and sliced, but not sliced all the way through.
Crab Strudel
Salmon Pasta Salad
The final product of all your hard work. Hope you like it! With the strudel, we had a 2009 Cold Springs phren/ology Riesling and a 2014 Domaine Saint Nabor Gris de Gris. Both wines went very well with the strudel.
And if you wanted to know more about strudel – inquiring minds need to know, Wikipedia says,
The best-known strudels are Apfelstrudel (German for apple strudel) and Topfenstrudel (with sweet soft quark cheese, in Austrian German Topfen), followed by the Millirahmstrudel (Milk-cream strudel, Milchrahmstrudel). Other strudel types include sour cherry (Weichselstrudel), sweet cherry, nut filled (Nussstrudel), Apricot Strudel, Plum Strudel, poppy seed strudel (Mohnstrudel), and raisin strudel. There are also savoury strudels incorporating spinach, cabbage, pumpkin, and sauerkraut, and versions containing meat fillings like the (Lungenstrudel) or (Fleischstrudel).
Traditional Hungarian, Austrian, and Czech strudel pastry is different from strudels elsewhere, which are often made from puff pastry. The traditional strudel pastry dough is very elastic. It is made from flour with a high gluten content, water, oil and salt, with no sugar added. The dough is worked vigorously, rested, and then rolled out and stretched by hand very thinly with the help of a clean linen tea towel or kitchen paper. Purists say that it should be so thin that you can read a newspaper through it. A legend has it that the Austrian Emperor’s perfectionist cook decreed that it should be possible to read a love letter through it. The thin dough is laid out on a tea towel, and the filling is spread on it. The dough with the filling on top is rolled up carefully with the help of the tea towel and baked in the oven.
This is an East coast Blue Crab.
Really a good visit tonight to the newly opened – March 2015 – of Capitol Cellars at 5th and Main Streets in Boise in the Belgravia Building. (There is also an AirBNB in the building, Belgravia AirBNB.) The ambiance is like entering a “wine cave”. Dim lights; cool air and wonderful Waite Staff. In certain sections of the restaurant, it is like sitting in a wine cellar – because you really are! I have placed a permanent link in the sidebar of this blog so you can contact them, make reservations or check their manu. Definitely a 4-Star (out of 5-Stars) restaurant. My only comments about the food is that the risotto seemed to be a little gummy – undercooked. The crispy fries were not really as crispy as I had expected. I expected more of a twice fried Belgium style potato. Here are some photos from our visit. Enjoy! It is great to see that they use Idaho products and produce as much as possible. This would be a great Date Night restaurant or Special Occasion.
Boise Foodie Guild 