Túrós rétes

The story

Túrós rétes, strudel filled with sweetened curd cheese, is not reserved for Easter: sweetened túró is a standard filling for Hungarian strudel and for palacsinta, the thin crepes. It does have an Easter role. Pénzcentrum names rétes, with béles and kalács, as the sweet that usually closed the large Easter Sunday meal, which falls on March 28 in 2027. Rétes is a thin, stretched dough rolled around its filling, which separates it from béles, where the filling sits between a bottom and a top sheet. The filling depends on túró, the fresh curd cheese that the Budapest food-tour company Offbeat Budapest calls the real secret of Hungarian cooking. The word is of Turkic origin, túró already appears in Hungary's first cookbook, Szakács Tudomány, from 1580, and in 2019 the European Union registered crumbly Hungarian túró as a traditional specialty. Taste Hungary, another Budapest food-tour company, reports that túró makes up about half of all cheese eaten in the country and that it is closer to farmer's cheese or quark than to American cottage cheese. Hungarian recipes such as Pénzcentrum's sour cherry and túró vargabéles call for ready-made strudel sheets, and filo does the same job in the US. Bake it on Saturday and serve it at room temperature after the Sunday roast, or with coffee on Easter Monday.