Рецепт With love from Israel: mega-easy pareve “rogelach”
Many social media people have been worried over the last few days: apparently, if you Google “Israel,” you get all kinds of dire, terrible images.
This post is my attempt to fix that.
So why is the word “rogelach” in quotes up at the top? Because if you just google rogelach (or, as I did, rugelach), most of the recipes you’ll find involve cream cheese, and possibly milk and butter. It seems that us pareve people are in the minority when it comes to rogelach.
And because dairy does such incredible, delicious things when it lives inside a dough, these can never be truly “real” rogelach. But they can be a tasty, rogelach-shaped puffy cookie on your Shabbos table (or any other day of the week’s table), and some weeks, it just doesn’t get better than that.
I started with regular leftover challah dough. If you need a recipe, you can try my Reliable Challah recipe.
If you happen to have leftover dough sitting around, you may find these so easy you’ll wonder why people bother going out to bakeries to buy them in the first place.
You will also need some filling ready. My standby chocolate filling recipe is below, and takes about 30 seconds to mix up.
1. Roll our your dough into a circle. Mine were pretty thin, because I prefer more filling and less dough.
2. “Shmeer” it with chocolate filling. You could also add chocolate chips at this point, or almond paste, or anything else you like inside.
3. Cut it up like a pizza. I cut it in half first, then cut each half in half, and do that once more, to get 16 roughly even-sized pieces.
4. Starting at the outside, roll up the pieces, one by one.
5. Transfer each finished “rogela” to a baking pan.
6. Bake about 15-20 minutes at 350-ish (my oven here is only approximate; it’s turned to a notch below 200 Celsius) until lightly golden brown on top, as seen above.
In case you need one, Here’s my Standby Chocolate Filling recipe, which I have used from everything to hamentashen to kokosh to rogelach and beyond. The corn starch gives this a little bit of body, so it doesn’t just turn flat during the baking process, which happened with every previous filling recipe I tried.
STANDBY CHOCOLATE FILLING RECIPE
Unless you are feeding an army, use the half recipe!!!
Full Recipe (a ton – too much for most things)
Half Recipe (a lot – enough for most things)
- 3 cups sugar
- 2 cups powdered sugar
- 1/2 cup corn starch
- 2 cups cocoa
- approx 2 cups oil – but don’t dump it all in!
- 1 ½ cups sugar
- 1 cup powdered sugar
- ¼ cup corn starch
- 1 cup cocoa
approx 1 cup oil – but don’t dump it all in! 1. Mix in bowl. No mixer required, just stir it around until evenly mixed.
2. Store in fridge until ready to use. It will thicken slightly in the fridge, but will still be spreadable.
Optional: For Almond-Chocolate Filling, I added ground almonds and roasted cinnamon when I made this once and it made the filling taste special and less generic.
Good Shabbos from the holy land!