Kifli, Kolache, and Rugelach

Kifli, Kolache, and Rugelach... come again, please??

They are all cookie-sized pastry treats, Eastern-European in origin (Hungarian, Czech, Polish/Yiddish), usually crescent-shaped, filled with sweetened nuts or fruit preserves. Sometimes kolaches are made in the shape of what my mother would call a "thumb print cookie"...small, circular, and with a central depression holding gleaming preserves.

I loved these as a child. My old-world grandmother, who did many wonderful things in the kitchen, also baked from scratch every single day of her adult life. (Well, you have to have dessert, don't you?) She would often make kifli, which she called "horns". They were one of my favorite cookies. I loved the shape, as well as the fresh preserve filling (which she made regularly from the bounty of the big garden on their property).

I was recently asked to make some kolaches, so I set about finding or developing a recipe. I often start this process by talking to my mom, since she has a lot of my grandmother's old-style recipes which are hard to beat. Then, I scour the internet and a battery of cookbooks to compare and contrast subtleties in ingredients, ratios, and so on. Finally, I use all this information to draft my own interpretation of an item.

My mom's recipe seemed to have an unnecessary step, so I omitted that. Another recipe I found required the patience and gentle touch of a seasoned pastry professional, which was going to drive me and my spontaneous streak up the wall. After a fair amount of research, I found two variations of this pastry that I felt worthy of a test run.

The first variation included cream cheese as one of the fats that comprise the pastry dough. This is fairly common in rugelach recipes. It sounded like it would make a rich-tasting, yet tender-textured dough, so I got a batch of that going. The second variation just had butter and egg yolk (no cream cheese) in the dough, and appeared among sources I really trust, so that recipe was worth a go. I also shaped these cookies both as crescents and as "thumb-prints".

I had a more challenging time working with the cream cheese dough. It was very fragile. It had to be kept very cool while working it, which was not easy during this summer heat wave, and required an exacting touch when spooning out the preserves and creating crescent shapes. The butter dough was more forgiving. I feared, however, that it would somehow be lackluster or run-of-the mill...lacking in complexity. But it was considerably easier to work this dough to the appropriate thickness to allow for the right amount of overlap when making the crescent shaped cookies.

During the baking process, the cream cheese dough wanted to expand a little bit (the dairy ingredients give the dough a little puffiness), which made some of the crescents strain their horn-shape and come undone. There was nothing really wrong with them, but they looked sort of homespun. The thumb-prints fared well, though. The butter dough more or less stayed put...in the way that a pie crust would. The butter dough crescents, therefore, looked more attractive, like something you'd buy at a pastry shop.

The final taste-test surprised me. I thought the cream cheese dough would be superior. The cream cheese dough had a nice, tender texture, to be sure, but it also had a very slight aftertaste. My hypothesis is that with a substantial amount of a dairy product in the dough, you can discern the lactic acid, which is a little sour. Side-by-side with the butter dough, which tasted rich but neutral, and had a totally acceptable level of flakiness, I felt that the butter dough came out the victor.

Keep this in mind if you bake, or if you get called upon to do one of those dreaded Christmas-cookie exchanges. When making kifli, kolache, rugelach, or some similar pastry/cookie, you'll want to remember that for ease of manipulation and superior taste, butter dough wins out (unless you have a sentimental attachment to cream cheese dough because your Grandma Mildred always did it that way). And if you are not the patient or dexterous type, do make the thumb-print variation. They taste just as lovely and require less skill and handling (read: you'll be done in half the time).