Apple Strudel with Shortcrust Pastry

The flour and butter ratio here — flour at double the butter's weight — gives you a dough short enough to be tender but just firm enough to hold a filled log shape without collapsing when you move it onto a tray. If you rub the butter in while it's cold, you get greasy little pellets that won't bind; that's why the recipe has you take the butter out half an hour ahead. You want it soft enough to smear between your fingers and the flour, not so soft it's turned to liquid. In a UK kitchen the fridge usually runs colder than people think, so half an hour on the counter near the Sunday roast oven, rather than next to an open window in January, gets you there faster.

Baking powder in a shortcrust is unusual — most shortcrust recipes skip it, leaning on butter and gentle handling for tenderness. Here it's doing a small lift job, loosening what would otherwise be a dense tart base into something a bit more like a biscuit crumb, so the finished strudel doesn't eat like a solid brick of pastry. Any plain flour with a similar protein content works; nothing exotic required, and there's no reason to reach for a "strong" bread flour — that would just toughen it.

For the filling, use an apple that holds some shape under heat rather than collapsing to mush — a firm, slightly tart variety. Bramley, the classic British baking apple, will break down almost completely because it's bred for exactly that, which gives you a soft, almost jammy filling rather than one with bite; that's not wrong, just a different result than a firmer eating apple like Braeburn or Cox, which keeps some texture. Choose based on whether you want "apple sauce in pastry" or "chunks of apple in pastry" — both are fine, know which you're getting.

The raisins get soaked in water first because dry raisins dropped straight into a filling will pull moisture out of everything around them in the oven, leaving the pastry drier and the raisins still a bit tough at the core. A quick soak plumps them so they contribute softness instead of stealing it. Any dried vine fruit does the same job — sultanas, even chopped dried apricots if raisins aren't to your taste, as long as it's something that benefits from rehydrating.

Pine nuts bring a bit of resinous bite and fat against all that soft fruit and sugar; if you don't have them, a roughly chopped almond or hazelnut does the same structural job — something with crunch and its own flavour, not a soft nut like cashew that just disappears into the filling.

Lemon zest appears twice, once in the dough and once in the filling, and it's doing the same thing both times: cutting the flatness of plain sugar and butter with something sharp, so the whole thing doesn't taste one-note sweet. It's not optional decoration, it's balance — if you have no lemon, a little orange zest will do similar work, though the result leans sweeter rather than sharp.

At 180°C — a straightforward domestic oven setting, nothing fan-assisted or fussy required — the sugar in the dough caramelises at the surface while the butter inside melts and separates the flour layers just enough to flake a little, even without the folding techniques puff pastry relies on. Thirty to thirty-five minutes is your floor, not your deadline: look for pastry that's gone from pale to a proper gold-brown all over, including underneath if you can tip it and check, because a pale top with a soft, pallid bottom means the apple's released its water and the base never got hot enough to drive it off. That's the fridge being too generous with its shelf, or a tray too thick absorbing heat before the pastry does — nothing to panic about, just pull it and give it a few minutes more, checking by eye.

Letting it cool to room temperature before dusting with icing sugar isn't fussiness — hot pastry releases steam, and sugar dusted onto steam just dissolves into a wet patch instead of sitting as a clean white layer. Patience here is the difference between a strudel that looks finished and one that looks like it's been left out in the rain.