Teiglach - an Eastern-European Jewish Dessert

There was this dessert that the Gargoyle's paternal grandmother used to make. It was named Teiglach, and it was effectively a brittle of tiny baked crunchy balls of dough stuck together with honey syrup. It was obviously a lot of fuss, and it's been decades since the Gargoyle got to have it, so in the spirit of adventure and a honey-themed holiday, it seemed like the thing to try making it.

Searching for recipes in English promptly encountered non-ancestral ingredients. Never had we ever had dried fruit or nuts or ginger in it. Searching for recipes in Russian yielded something more plausible, but proportions varied widely.

The methodology boiled down to "make a dough, roll tiny balls, deep fry or bake them, then either coat or boil them in the syrup". But how to maximize the resemblance to the original?

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But, wait. Gargoyle's father was able to contact Gargoyle's aunt, who had the original hand-written notes from the grandmother.

In Russian, of course.

5 (4) eggs

2 (3) spoon vodka

2 (3) spoon veg oil

1 small glass - honey

1 small glass - water

1 large glass - sugar

When all that boils, drop in the "beans" and don't open the lid for 20 mins, then stir until done, until it turns brown.

Wet a cutting board, set out the dough, pour poppy seeds on top and

cut while (cold - crossed out ) warm.

This is one batch.

There are a few problems here. Like flour, which obviously needs to be there, being omitted altogether. And glasses being an indeterminate unit - no doubt obvious with her particular glassware, but mysterious here and now. And spoon sizes being omitted. And the ingredient list not being divided into dough and syrup. And baking the dough being implied. Clearly, more help was needed.

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The cookbook of the maternal grandmother had a recipe also. (Which she had never made in Gargoyle's memory.)

5 egg

3 tbsp vodka

3 tbsp oil

flour until soft dough

roll the dough into small balls and throw into syrup

syrup

0.5 glass honey

1 glass sugar

0.5 glass water

boil 1 hour with closed lid, stirring

then lay on cutting board, mush, and (word cut off - possibly sprinkle poppy seeds)

At least it designated an ingredient subdivision, and spoons are sized, but the flour quantity remained no less mysterious. It also didn't explicitly mention baking the dough, and the boiling step was peculiarly long.

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Internet to the rescue! One source (link in Russian, sorry) suggested:

• 6 eggs

• 3 tbsp vodka (or cognac or brandy or whiskey)

• 1 pinch salt

• flour 4.5 cups, or maybe 5, until dough stops sticking to hands. Like, start w/4 and pour more slowly.

AHA! Plausible and with clear guidelines. Let's go with this.

Note the absence of sugar in the dough. Which matches the maternal grandmother's notes. Interesting, let's see what else we can see.

Another version suggested 3 tbsp of sugar in the dough, 2 tbsp in the syrup (which didn't seem like enough) and 2 tbsp more to sprinkle on top. That one also omitted the vodka and added the soda+vinegar leavening (discussed at some length in the Sharlotka post). This got one wondering about the role of the vodka in the dough. American sources all agree it makes pie crusts flakier, but don't say much about other dough sorts. Russian sources claim a better-rising dough if it's meant to rise, and a flakier one if it's meant to be flaky, with longer shelf life and baking more evenly. They also say that it's enough to have 1tbsp of vodka for an entire kilogram batch of dough. That's a lot of claims for such a trivial amount of booze, and perhaps a future Sharlotka will undergo a vodka treatment instead of the volcano. (Note, in that case, add it before the flour).

Another recipe might have provided a translation for "large glass" as being 2 cups, and explicitly verified the sugarless dough, and omitted both the vodka and the leavening.

None of them agreed on the amount of flour or its ratio to the eggs.

A few other versions added butter or margarine as a dough ingredient.

A few suggested extra ingredients in the syrup, such as lemon zest or indeed ginger; these seemed to be translations of English recipes.

A few versions added an oil or margarine for deep-frying, others baked the dough, as shall we.

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A half-batch was attempted to make the number of dough balls hopefully more manageable.

• 3 eggs

• 2 tbsp vodka

• pinch of salt

• 2 cups of flour was, as expected, insufficient but made an almost-dough one could poke at. More flour was added by the tablespoon without counting until the dough was kind of play-dough-ey.

There was a "let it rest for 15-30 mins" step was totally missed, oops. The realization came more than 15 minutes into the rolling process, at which point any dough that wasn't already tiny balls had presumably rested sufficiently. (The implication of missing the step is a less structurally resilient dough.)

A cookie sheet was parchmented and lubricated.

The process became:

Rollin', rollin', rollin'

Grab a small handful of dough.

• roll a gummy worm shape between one's hands

• if it's too sticky to roll well, give it more flour

• pinch the worm's little head off and let it fall on a cutting board. Repeat until no worm left.

• pick up and roll each pinched off bit into until round-ish and drop it on the lined baking sheet, such that it doesn't touch its neighbors

• repeat forever

Note: some recipes, especially English-language ones, do significantly larger dough balls or larger diameter dough sausages they twist into knots rather than make balls out of, and other such variations. No doubt valid somewhere, but not in the geography whose style is being approximated here. It's hard to say how long that took, but it was sufficient time for the long-suffering Spouse to have driven to the grocery store to pick up more eggs, having used up the last of them in the recipe. The yield exceeded the biggest cookie sheet available and about half-filled a smaller one.

Father had mentioned observing his mother, sister and neighbor collaborating on the process and rolling from the same dough more or less the same way, and the resulting batches tasting different. This is probably a factor of how tightly the balls are rolled, because it really can't be anything else. But of course there's no way to calibrate that.

This recipe came with an instruction to bake for 15 minutes. After 15 the dough balls looked cooked but kind of pale. The reference photos showed rather more golden brown sides. It got baked for another 5 minutes. This was probably a mistake.

Sugar was dissolved in honey (just over .5 cup sugar, about half of a 450g jar of nice dark honey) on low heat. The dough balls were dumped into it without intermediate sampling.

In they went, and simmered, covered, for 20 minutes. (On low heat, which perhaps should have been even lower). After which came the hard part.

The instruction said to pack them onto a cutting board, sprinkling with poppy seeds, and cutting while still warm.

The mental picture of what would happen now involved the balls being saturated with the syrup and it being mostly absorbed, but there was still an alarming amount of liquid, and it wasn't obvious what to do about that. Nor was it particularly obvious how to manipulate it into a sheet that was 2-3 dough balls deep - spreading in a single row was plausible, as was making lumpy mountains, but just not anything piled yet even. And the sticky syrup was obviously cooling fast.

A future version of this, if it ever happens, ought to perhaps involve lining a container to dump it into, so it makes its own form. Poppy seeds were dumped on top in some quantity. (One source suggested poppy-seeding the surface first before dumping out the dough as well, which would have been clever.)

Eventually, the result still nothing like the even, tidy reference pictures (note, link in Russian, but pix are pix), was shrugged at and left to congeal as it might... at which point, while scrubbing the pot and the spoon, the Gargoyle wondered just how badly the result was going to stick to the cutting board. (It actually wasn't too terribly bad, not as hard as stopping the caramel from drying on the bottom of the pot).

Also, instructions said to cut them, and the childhood memory was of fairly regularly-shaped squares slicing through the dough balls, but they seemed far too hard to be inclined to cooperate.

Patience is not the primary virtue here, so with a bit of jabbing under the half-cooled blob with spatula, it was determined that once the syrup congeals to a somewhat less runny state, one can kind of shape the chunks, and one can kind of pull off nice portion pieces and set them onto parchment to finish cooling. There, cookie shapes achieved.

Grandma would be proud, but only because that's how grandmas roll

Verdict: it's hard to calibrate against a decade-old memory, which was certainly of something hard and crunchy and sticky, but this was definitely too hard and crunchy and sticky.

Next time, bake less, boil at even lower temp, try to control the shape it cools in.

Adding fruits or nuts at the "boil it in syrup" stage is no doubt a fine way to get more finished product without having to make more dough balls, and might even appeal to those who'd like to experience different flavors and textures, but there's something enjoyable about the uniformity.

Ginger might provide a break from the relentless sticky sweetness of the honey syrup. No judgement, but that's an anti-feature as far as the Gargoye's concerned, the goal here is a rock of sweetness.

A really dark, distinctively-flavored honey, though, added a deepness to the flavor, and totally worth the upgrade from a clover bear.

The poppy seeds were an absolute must-have.

The non-sweetness of the dough was a definite plus.

A Devil wise in the ways of baking thought of pretzels and wished for salt, so the official serving suggestion is hereby "serve alongside a margarita", in which the tartness and the salt rim really do balance out the stickiness. (He also had great suggestions to improve the process, but as by then margaritas were involved and the notes weren't promptly recorded, they are lost to history.) Also, there's a reason father recalls this being made communally - a half-batch was a tolerable amount of labor, doubling it to a full batch would have been far too tedious solo.