- Prep time: 1 hour 30 minutes
- Cook time: 40 minutes
- Makes: 2
- Difficulty: challenging
- Course: pastry
- Cookware: 2 round bake tins with removable base, 25 cm
- Cuisine: Odessa
Ingredients
⠀- 1 kg filo dough
- 2 kg apples
- 200 g sugar
To roll out the dough:
- 100 ml oil / 100 g butter, plus extra for greasing
Cooking method
Step 1
For the filling, quarter and core the apples. Grate apples in a bowl on the large holes of a paddle or box grater. Add sugar and mix. Set aside.
Step 2
Heat oven to 170°C. Butter a baking dish. Divide the dough into 8 parts. Roll each part into a ball and cover in cling film or with a towel so that the dough doesn’t dry out. If you use butter to roll out the dough, then melt it in a saucepan. Grease the work surface with plenty of oil or butter. Roll the dough ball with a rolling pin in a circle. Oil your hands. Use your fingers to stretch the dough in the centre so that the table is visible through the dough. Use your fingers to stretch the dough around the edges in small sections around the entire perimeter of the circle until the dough becomes thin like tissue paper. Try to prevent the formation of many holes during stretching.
Step 3
Drain the juice from grated apples. Along the long edge of the dough lay out the filling like ‘sausage’ and carefully wrap it in the dough. Spread the filling with your hands evenly throughout the roll. Take the roll at both ends and slightly beat on the table so that the filling is better distributed and the roll is even more stretched along the entire length. Put the roll on the table and carefully twist. Ready twists with a filling roll like a ‘snail’ and put in a baking dish. Repeat for the remaining pieces of dough. From this amount of dough and filling you will get 8 twists, 4 for each form. When laying out rolls, don’t fold them too tightly so that they bake better. Put vertuta pastry in the oven and bake for 35-40 minutes until light brown.
My tips and tricks:
When you master the dough, and it will cease to frighten you with its complexity, and vertuta becomes your family’s favourite dish, the next question that arises before you is: what else can be wrapped? 🙂 I have an answer for you! For sweet vertutas the filling can be: rose jam mixed with chopped walnuts; cottage cheese with sugar and yolk; pumpkin with sugar and with or without cinnamon. For savoury vertutas: feta cheese or brynza crumble; salted cottage cheese with egg and dill; stewed cabbage with onions. For savoury vertutas, I recommend you to stretch the dough on vegetable oil: olive or sunflower. For sweet vertutas, use butter, although it is more difficult to stretch the dough on it: it cools down quickly. So it’s better to start with vegetable oil. You will become familiar with the process, and then you can stretch all the sweet vertutas only with butter. And do not forget to treat your friends: as they say in Odessa, vertuta is a dish one cannot be ashamed to “pay a visit” with.
- 1 kg filo dough
- 2 kg apples
- 200 g sugar
- To roll out the dough:
- 100 ml oil / 100 g butter, plus extra for greasing
- For the filling, quarter and core the apples. Grate apples in a bowl on the large holes of a paddle or box grater. Add sugar and mix. Set aside.
- Heat oven to 170°C. Butter a baking dish. Divide the dough into 8 parts. Roll each part into a ball and cover in cling film or with a towel so that the dough doesn’t dry out. If you are using butter to roll out the dough, then melt it in a saucepan. Grease the work surface with plenty of oil or butter. Roll the dough ball with a rolling pin in a circle. Oil your hands. Use your fingers to stretch the dough in the centre so that the table is visible through the dough. Use your fingers to stretch the dough around the edges in small sections around the entire perimeter of the circle until the dough becomes thin like tissue paper. Try to prevent the formation of many holes during stretching.
- Drain the juice from grated apples. Along the long edge of the dough lay out the filling like ‘sausage’ and carefully wrap it in the dough. Spread the filling with your hands evenly throughout the roll. Take the roll at both ends and slightly beat on the table so that the filling is better distributed and the roll is even more stretched along the entire length. Put the roll on the table and carefully twist. Ready twists with a filling roll like a ‘snail’ and put in a baking dish. Repeat for the remaining pieces of dough. From this amount of dough and filling you will get 8 twists, 4 for each form. When laying out rolls, don’t fold them too tightly so that they bake better. Put vertuta pastry in the oven and bake for 35-40 minutes until light brown.