♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - You know, my wife Melissa has family in Salzburg-- her mother grew up there-- so we go about once a year.

And it turns out there's a whole bunch of recipes that you never really see in the States, like marillenknödel.

But there are two recipes everyone knows-- wiener schnitzel, of course, and apfelstrudel-- apple strudel.

Now, wiener schnitzel, I got a lesson in Salzburg on how to make it.

It was a great technique for getting that wavy, thin coating.

And then the strudel is something you can actually do at home.

I thought it was too difficult.

You need to take dough, stretch it out to over two feet, put the filling in and roll it up.

And there are tricks to both.

So please stay tuned as we figure out how to make two of Austria's greatest recipes at home.

♪ ♪ - Funding for this series was provided by the following: ♪ ♪ (bells ringing) - For my strudel lesson, I visited with home cook Petra Steinbichler and her mother, Eva-Maria.

- My mom is going to show you how to do the dough because it's something special and you need a little bit of skills to do it.

But it's something very typical Austrian, and I think you won't find it anywhere else in the world.

Flour, a little bit of salt, oil.

You can mix it together with the warm water.

Then you can try funny parts.

- Oh, there's a funny part?

- Yes, it's afterwards.

- Uh... yeah.

(speaking German) - You know, I love the fact your mother's, like, really nervous that I'm doing this.

She's like, I can tell she's going like, "Oh!"

- (laughter, speaking German) - You just put it over your hands.

Start very small, not too big, because otherwise you have the hole insides.

Just try very small stretching the dough, and you will see how long you can stretch it before it gets a hole inside.

So it said it should be as thin so you can read... ...a piece of paper underneath.

For the filling, you need about 50 gram of bread crumbles... crumbs?

- Bread crumbles is better than bread crumbs.

It's much better.

- Okay, you, put everything together and brown it just a little bit.

It should not be too brown because otherwise it's getting bitter.

You need about four big apples that are a little bit sour.

Yes, not too sweet.

Of course, you need the sweet and the sour touch.

♪ ♪ Then you put the filling and you take off the tablecloth, and just roll it.

- Easy.

Anybody can do it.

- Yes.

♪ ♪ (chatter in background) I'm going home.

I'm gonna be making this, because the rolling out the dough, I thought it was... the whole thing was just rolled out.

It's stretched out.

(clears throat) And that little trick with a-- the funny part, with the tablecloth.

Um, yeah, I mean, it's... You can do this, I can do this.

I am gonna do this.

Mmm.

♪ ♪ So in the next few minutes, it may be the end of my culinary career.

Or it'll be some culinary sleight of hand.

I'm talking about apfelstrudel-- apple strudel.

And I never thought that I would ever want to make this at home.

There are two problems-- the dough is super thin.

And the other thing is, then, you fill it, right?

And then you gotta roll it up.

Well, how are you gonna roll it up without everything going all over the place?

So I did get a lesson last time I was in Salzburg.

A friend of a friend took me over, and her mother, Eva-Maria, showed me how to do this.

And it was amazing.

♪ ♪ The first thing is to make the dough, right?

But the dough has to be dough that's super easy to stretch and it's not gonna pull back.

This is a pretty wet dough to start with.

Now, the other thing you're thinking, I'm sure, at home, is this doesn't look like very much dough.

If you're gonna roll it out to a two-and-a-half foot-- I'll say that one more time-- two-and-a-half foot by two foot rectangle.

But it's gonna work.

now, one of the things she did is while she was kneading this dough by hand, she crashed it like that on the counter, build the gluten.

This is a case where you do want a lot of gluten development.

because you need it to be super stretchy.

This would be a great recipe to make on a Monday.

Like, you're really not ready to go back to work.

May not be in a great mood.

You just want to whack some dough like this, that's fine.

You can also tell when the dough's getting closer.

You get more of a crack, more of a distinctive noise instead of a plop.

And that's because the gluten is getting developed.

(loud thumps) That was a good one!

I like that.

That's a smack.

So you go from plop to smack.

Gonna wrap it up and let this sit.

And then we can start working on the filling.

So we have sugar.

Cinnamon-- not too much.

Cinnamon's okay in this recipe.

And salt.

So we're gonna toast, first, walnuts, put them in with the sugar, et cetera.

Then we'll do breadcrumbs, toast those, put them in, and finally, we're gonna melt some butter and brown it and add that to the filling mixture Now I hate Granny Smith apples.

Why are we using Granny Smith apples?

Well, I hate eating them out of hand.

I think they're just nasty.

They have one redeeming characteristic, which is they don't break down when you bake with them.

The older I get, the lazier I am, so I'm just gonna cut to the sides of the core.

Now, it's getting to be that time.

As I said, this could be the last day of my culinary career, or it could be a moment of triumph.

So what Eva-Marie did was she had a tablecloth like this.

A little bit of flour, not too much.

Do I look nervous?

I am.

This dough is just amazing.

I've never worked with a dough that is easier to work with-- famous last words.

So we're going to get this out to 12 inches with a rolling pin.

Maybe I should have worn my lederhosen for this.

I did buy lederhosen years ago in Austria.

Unfortunately, I don't fit into them anymore so that's my excuse.

I once tried doing this using the pizza method by getting my hands up underneath it.

I watched her do it, and she just took both hands.

She would just stretch out like this.

It's helpful to have one hand kind of holding the dough down.

So you can stretch, otherwise it'll just move.

Now, if you do poke a hole on this or it tears, it's okay because it's going to roll up and no one's going to know-- except everybody watching the show.

So you can see the dough is pretty much translucent there.

You can see my hand through it-- hello!

I think we should stop while we're ahead.

You'll notice that the very edges are a little thicker.

This is like jumping in a really cold swimming pool early in the morning, right?

You're kind of, like, making up 25 reasons to take it slowly.

So now we're going to scatter this on.

We're going to leave about an inch-and-a-half from the edges.

I guess I can't avoid the next step, right?

As a kid, when I was haying, the last bale that went up in the barn, the farmer I worked for, Charlie, always used to say, that's the one we've been looking for.

Right, the last one?

So this is the last big step.

This is the one we've been looking for, so.

I'm going to start rolling over just a little bit to get it started.

Here we go.

You ready for this?

Ta-da!

I still have a job, it's amazing.

Now, could you just like clap or something?

I mean, that was, that was pretty amazing.

So it loads right up.

Anybody can actually do this, even me.

If you really want to impress somebody or impress yourself, you know, this is not a hard recipe.

You just have to have a little faith at the end, and a tablecloth.

So in the 400 degree oven for 30, 35 minutes, and then we'll take a look.

♪ ♪ You can see it's literally paper thin.

which is always the thing that stumped me about doing this recipe.

Until I met Eva-Maria-- she showed me how to do it.

Everything in Austria is mit schlag-- with whipped cream.

You know, when I go to cook with people, usually in their homes, sometimes they'll just want to do it themselves, because they have their stuff.

Other times, I'll ask if I can cook with them, or they'll ask me to do it.

They got the big thing of dough, and I actually tried it myself, and it did work.

But when I did it in Austria, I did it, I think, without any filling-- it was just the dough.

Just to see if I could do it.

- Yes, yes, und whoosh!

- Hey, that's not bad!

It's not bad.

I mean, there's no filling in it, but... Make sure you have your whole family there with your iPhones taking a video of the rolling up, because it's absolutely amazing.

So direct from Salzburg, Austria, a real at-home version of apfelstrudel anybody, I think, anybody can make in their own kitchen.

♪ ♪ - Spätzle means "little sparrows," and that's reason enough for me to make this dish.

Second, the texture-- these noodles are the perfect hybrid between a noodle and a dumpling.

So we start with a very simple batter.

The only seasoning is nutmeg.

If you can find whole nutmeg and you have a rasp grater, it really improves the flavor to grate it freshly into the flour; you don't need much.

The black pepper, I should say, is actually the second seasoning, right?

Pepper is a spice.

Salt and pepper.

Salt is a mineral.

Pepper is a spice.

And then you just whisk this together, and you really can use a whisk because this comes together as a batter, it's not so much a dough.

So our batter rested for 30 minutes.

I transferred it to a smaller bowl, it's a little easier for using our spätzle maker.

We also have our water boiling.

We're going to add a tablespoon of salt.

While this comes back up to a boil, I'm gonna talk about our equipment.

So this is a spätzle maker-- has a little hopper.

We put our batter in, and you run it back and forth.

But a large-holed cheese grater also works really well.

So you rest it right over the pot.

You have your hopper ready, and then don't pour in all the batter, right?

We're gonna do this in batches.

You can see how in that 30 minutes, this got a lot firmer as a batter.

All right, so you just run the hopper across the holes like this.

And you can see I have my little spätzle falling down into the bottom of the pot.

And I'm just gonna wait for them to come up to the surface, and then actually wait another full minute.

They will come up to the surface when they're still underdone.

Now they're done, I'm gonna transfer them to a colander.

I'm gonna rinse them until they're cool.

Okay, so if you don't have the spätzle maker, what do you do?

Here's our large-holed grater.

You put it over the top.

But now you're gonna need this spatula, because we don't have our hopper.

And then the same thing, right?

The principle's exactly the same.

We just needed to come up with a way where you didn't need a special piece of equipment.

So I'm gonna rinse this last batch, and then I'm gonna show you a really simple way to dress up these noodles.

We're gonna start with the butter.

You can be as simple as butter, and the herbs, but we're gonna add a little bit of sweet paprika.

I can't not do a little spice education here.

It's my favorite thing to teach.

So when it comes to toasting spices, if you put spices into a screaming hot pan, you have a second before they burn.

But by having the pan a little cooler, the butter needs a little more time to melt, I can really infuse the butter with the paprika, and the dish gets that much better.

But now these have bloomed.

I can smell the paprika up here.

I don't need to bend over.

Means they're ready.

Spätzle goes in our pan, and we're just gonna cook these until we actually get a little browning on the noodles.

And in that time, I'm gonna chop up some herbs.

We really like chives and dill.

It's nice to get a pretty fine mince on the chives.

That way you get a little in every bite.

I hear my spätzle doing a little crackle, which is great, but that means I want to give them a turn.

So I can get browning on multiple sides.

And now for the dill.

Oh, immediately you can smell the dill.

It's just an intoxicating aroma.

I love it.

So you can see that you've got these plump dumpling-like noodles, but they're irregular, which makes eating them really fun.

Right, some are gonna be denser and a little bit bigger.

Some will be smaller.

We've got our little crispy edges.

And when I stir, I can really hear how dry the pan is.

Pan goes off.

We can add in our herbs.

Oh, look what herbs do to a dish.

Immediately, it looks like springtime in here instead of winter.

And now let's see how they taste.

♪ ♪ It's the texture, man.

I got a little bit of crunch and then the flavor.

So this could easily be dinner in my house.

But traditionally, it's served with pork schnitzel.

And now you're going to learn how to make that.

♪ ♪ (indistinct chatter) (chuckles) - As they say, sometimes the old ways are the best ways.

It's really nice when there is a way of doing something that doesn't change because it actually, after hundreds of years, people have figured out it's the best way.

- So for schnitzel, at first, you have to take your schnitzel cutlet and you pound it as thin as you could, season it with salt and pepper.

Then you will put it in flour, then in an egg wash, coat it on both sides, again, and then you will put it in bread crumbs.

After that, you can put it in a pan filled with purified butter.

You have to constantly move the pan so the hot butter flashes on top of the schnitzel.

So it looks wavy-- it's like soufflé-ing.

- So, normally, I would make a schnitzel with oil, but you use clarified butter, so clarified butter is just for flavor, it makes it crispier?

What's the difference?

- It's for the flavor, and it makes it crispier, and it makes it more wavy on top of it.

The oil, it just sucks it up.

- Oh.

- The schnitzel, and then, it doesn't get that crispy.

And just let it cook in there until it's ready.

That's a wiener schnitzel.

- You said you made 700 of these yesterday.

- About, yeah.

- The coating has to be light.

The cutlet has to be thin.

Mm.

I gotta say that what people don't get right in the States is it's not wavy and puffy.

You can see this, I mean, that's how to make it.

And the coating is super-thin, too.

- There's one proper way to do it.

- That's the word.

- That's the proper way.

- Oh, this is delicious.

♪ ♪ - So I go to Germany about once a year, and one of my absolute favorite things in Germany is schnitzel.

It seems really plain, and it is absolutely not, it's absolutely one of the best things you can have, and I was thrilled to see Chris come back from Austria with this fantastic recipe with some really important points about how to make schnitzel.

And that all begins with the breadcrumbs.

Now, in the States, a lot of the times, if you have schnitzel, those breadcrumbs are going to be sort of thick and coarse and maybe a little gritty.

In Germany and Austria, they will make breadcrumbs fresh for the schnitzel from a delicate roll.

And the closest we have here is kaiser rolls.

We're gonna bake these at 300 degrees for about 45 minutes, turning them every 15 minutes.

I'm gonna put these in the oven, and I already have a batch here.

They're really dry.

You can hear them.

And at this point, we're gonna grind them really fine in a food processor.

They're gorgeous.

If a breadcrumb could be gorgeous, right?

And this is gonna be really the heart and soul of our schnitzel.

So let's go ahead and discuss the pork now.

So one of the joys of schnitzel in Germany or Austria is how thin the meat is.

I mean, it's paper thin.

So for our schnitzel, we're gonna use boneless pork loin chops.

We tried a whole bunch of different kinds of pork-- pork shoulder, pork tenderloin-- and decided that pork loin chops really are the best.

So I'm gonna put down a sheet of plastic wrap and put my pork loin right in the center there.

So when you're pounding out the cutlets, it can help to sprinkle a little bit of water.

It sort of lubricates the meat and the plastic and top it with another piece of the plastic wrap.

Now, you don't want to smash it.

Don't take your aggressions out on this pork.

We want to be nice to it.

I'm not hammering this cutlet straight up and down because that can smash the cutlet out unevenly.

Using sort of a glancing blow.

So I'm sort of smearing it as I go, and I'm also going to turn that cutlet so I'm not hitting things unevenly.

You really want to make sure it's very even as you're pounding it out.

Okay.

I'd say that's just about an eighth-inch thick there.

The Austrians have a saying about their strudel dough that you should be able to read a newspaper through it.

I would think you should almost be able to read through a schnitzel cutlet.

You may have the occasional hole.

You can almost see through that hole there.

That's okay, it's gonna get covered up in the breading.

So for the best texture, we're gonna use a standard breading technique.

And that, of course, is flour followed by an egg wash followed by those breadcrumbs.

And I'm gonna season the meat.

Sometimes when you're making a breading, you'll season the crumbs, you'll season the flour.

We're just gonna season that meat very gently.

It really helps to have three even-sized containers when you're breading; I feel like I do this at home a lot, and I don't have three even-sized containers, and I wish I did.

It just makes the breading process a lot easier.

And then I'm gonna flip it over; I'm not packing the crumbs on.

I'm just covering it, so... Those crumbs are really, really fine.

And they're gonna cling in a nice, even layer.

So I'm gonna flip it twice just to make sure it's a very even layer.

The perfect schnitzel crust separates from the meat.

It sort of puffs up, so you get this really nice contrast between the chewy meat and the crisp coating.

One of the things that Chris found when he was in Austria is that fat really matters.

Well, we're talking about a mix of fats, actually.

We're talking about equal parts neutral, higher smoke point oil, something like sunflower oil, or rice bran oil, grapeseed oil, mixed with clarified butter, which is what they tend to use a lot of in Europe, or ghee.

Clarified butter and ghee both have the butter solids cooked off and removed.

It's also-- the water is removed.

What happens if you're trying to cook with water?

Well, you need to cook that moisture out of there first.

So clarified butter and ghee are all fat.

There's no water left in there, and the butter solids are removed.

So you end up with a very clear, pure cooking fat with a lot of flavor.

You have that really rich, buttery flavor that's going to flavor the schnitzel.

When we're looking at frying temp, we want to hit 325, which sounds low; if you're used to deep frying, it's more like 350, 375.

325 is what we're after here.

We hit 325.

So let's go ahead and put our first cutlet in.

And here comes the second part.

It's temperature, but it's also movement.

So what Chris found, and that the chef he worked with there really emphasized, you have to move the pan back and forth.

So we're creating a wave of oil that's just going to help create that undulating layer of crust.

If you were to do this with a mix of oil and regular butter, you would have all these brown butter solids.

It would be a mess.

You can see it's really pure, clean-looking oil.

It's important that the cutlet is submerged and everything cooks.

We're not flipping this cutlet at all.

One of my favorite chefs in the world, Fergus Henderson, in London, his cookbooks are great.

They have very colorful language, and he refers to this step as "shuggling."

So it's shuggling the pan back and forth, which I love, and it's very onomatopoeic.

So it's really a beautiful thing.

You can see it's starting to brown.

You can see it's starting to crisp up.

And I'm just sliding that back and forth and basting it every now and again to ensure sort of that top layer does get really well browned.

Okay.

As we can see, we have that gorgeously brown crust-- I think I did it right.

We want to double check that our oil is back to temperature before we add our next round of cutlets.

We're done.

I'm really excited for this because I haven't had schnitzel since last time I went to Germany.

And Chris came back, and he just kept talking about how amazing the schnitzel was that he had in Salzburg.

And it's, like, he rubs it in-- he has to dig me on that.

And you really don't need much with schnitzel.

It's all about sort of enjoying the details here.

Lemon wedges, classic.

A little bit of acid, of course, cuts the richness of that crust.

And lingonberry jam.

Jam on schnitzel, it's perfect.

That little bit of sweetness brings up the sweetness of the crust, the pork, there's the tartness from the lingonberry.

And Rosie made me this perfect spätzle.

And I'm gonna go ahead and just cut a piece here-- oh, yeah.

So you can see the separation of the crust over that cutlet and you can see how even the meat is and how thin that crust is.

Mmm!

It is just a beautiful rendition of Austrian wiener schnitzel.

Well worth making at home.

Well worth paying really close attention to the details.

You're not going to get this anywhere out in the States-- it just doesn't happen.

This is a really beautiful, beautiful recipe.

You can get this recipe and all the other recipes of this season of Milk Street at MilkStreetTV.com.

(bells ringing) ♪ ♪ - First of all, you pound the meat and season it with salt and pepper and spread mustard on one side.

We need a little bit of bacon.

And carrots.

And those are pickles.

You roll it together and then you brown it a little bit in clarified butter.

And you put the bacon and carrots and then you add a little bit of tomato paste.

And afterwards red wine.

You put the roulades inside again, and you cook them for about 90 minutes.

The dumpling, you have to get some in Austria, it's called knödel.

And you warm a little bit of milk.

And when it's finished, you put everything together and put it in a napkin.

And then you cook it in boiling water for about 30 to 35 minutes.

Depends on the size.

- The knödel, the dumplings are, which I know is a specialty in Austria, but it's so good, it's so light.

If I had to pick the meat or the dumpling, I think I go with dumplings and sauce almost every time.

Delicious.

♪ ♪ Recipes and episodes from this season of Milk Street are available at MilkStreetTV.com, along with shopping lists, printer-ready recipes, and step-by-step videos.

Access our content anytime to change the way you cook.

- The new Milk Street Cookbook is now available and includes every recipe from our TV show.

From Vietnamese chicken salad and tiramisu to easy-stretch pizza dough and Austrian apple strudel, the new Milk Street Cookbook offers bolder, fresher, simpler recipes.

Order your copy of the Milk Street Cookbook for $29.95, 40% less than the cover price.

Call 855-MILK-177 or order online.

- Funding for this series was provided by the following.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪