Mushroom and Spinach Strudel

Ok, so, I saw this picture and thought, “Man, that looks good! Let’s figure out how to make it!”

  

It was called, “Wild Mushroom and Spinach Strudel". So, it must have mushrooms and spinach and figured that is probably some good cheese in it and it looked like Phyllo dough on the outside.

So, gathered some ingredients and started trying to do this.

That’s some mushrooms (sliced), green onions, garlic, spinach, goat cheese, oregano, salt and an egg yolk. You probably noticed that I buy oregano in bulk from our local grocer. I do that for most of the spices. Here is part of the spice rack. This is fish net attached to the inside of one of our kitchen cabinets where small clips are used to hold the spices to the net.

So, back to the trial. Figured that the stuffing had to be cooked, and, that it had to be pretty dry in order to be sure that the dough doesn’t get too wet.

So, first dried the mushrooms before slicing them.

Then sliced them and then placed them in a linen towel.

 

Then, folded the whole towel up.

 

And started squeezing the heck out of it to squeeze as much liquid out as possible. Here’s how much liquid I got out of the mushrooms, along with the mushrooms afterwards.

Then, heated up the frying pan, added some olive oil and started cooking the green onions.

 After giving them a head start of about a minute, I added the mushrooms.

 

Just when the liquid started coming out of the mushrooms, I added some salt, minced garlic and chili flakes to it. After 30 seconds it came off the heat and scraped onto paper towels to drain off more liquid.

Used the last of my Hungarian Hatch Chili peppers!

Now, into the now dried frying pan went the spinach. Heat lowered to low, cover on, and wilt the spinach. (Takes about 3 minutes.) Then the spinach goes on paper towels to drain off more liquid. I also pressed paper towels on top to soak up more liquid.

Then it was time for assembly.

Decided to start with 4 sheets of the phyllo sheets.

 

Placed these on parchment paper and then brushed it with olive oil.

Then, spread some goat cheese in the center. I found out that spreading the cheese with my fingers worked best.

 

Sprinkled some oregano on it and then placed some spinach on it. Also some raisins as all strudels have raisins, right?

Then the mushrooms.

Then the Phyllo sheets are folded over and placed on parchment paper on baking sheets. Decided that on a couple of them I will brush on some egg yolk and sprinkle salt. The other two were just brushed with olive oil. Then all go into a 375 F oven. After 20 minutes in the oven (rotating to ensure that they were cooking evenly), they were done.

Here’s the ones with the egg yolk.

 

And here’s the ones with just the olive oil.

 

The filling is fantastic. Need to work on the packaging. So, next time will probably increase the oven temperature to 400. May think about how to wrap the Phyllo sheets around the stuffing. Also need to try with my own puff pastry dough.