Living in Southern Maryland, I miss a lot of the foods that are common staples where I grew up in New Jersey. So I often try to find ways to make them myself. Beigli is one of those items. This Hungarian Poppyseed Roll has always been a favorite of mine. Beigli is a yeast-bread based sweet pastry that can typically be found around the holidays like Christmas and Easter. The fillings are traditionally a poppyseed paste or a walnut filling. My favorite has always been poppyseed.
I think my grandmother used to make her own. She also made cookies with the same fillings. My mom used to pick the rolls up at the Trenton Farmers Market. When I was in Florida, she would buy it and send me care packages, but the Florida heat and ants did not agree with this method.
In Maryland, I don’t have to worry about the same issues I had with the mail as in Florida. But ants will always find a way. Let’s just say my mom does not any proof her packages enough. Beigli is available through Amazon if you are willing to pay the price. There is a bakery in New York that will ship across the country (have not had any ant invasions yet!). It is not bad, but nothing like the freshly baked ones.
After scrolling through Pinterest, I had the idea to take a strudel hack that uses Solo brand canned pastry filling and premade crescent roll dough to make a danish type recipe. I thought, why not try it with the poppyseed filling? So here is my attempt to hack Beigli!
Ingredients:
- 1 can Solo brand Poppyseed filling
- 1 can Pillsbury Crescent Dough Sheets
Materials:
- Baking sheet
- Pizza cutter
Procedure:
- Preheat oven to 375.
- Roll out crescent dough on baking sheet (I used a silicon baking mat on mine). If using regular crescent dough, pinch edges together to form one sheet.
- Using pizza cutter, cut vertical strips partway down dough on top and bottom. Make sure you leave at least two inches in the middle for your filling.
- Spoon filling horizontally across your uncut portion of the dough.
- Fold over the dough stills in an alternating pattern, similar to a braid.
- Bake 20 min or until golden brown.
- Let cool! Filling will be hot!
You could probably also use pre-made bread dough or frozen yeast rolls to the same effect. I found these to be a little sweet…i did make the mistake of sprinkling with sugar while waiting for it to cool. It so did not need that!
Lessons learned…The amount of filling you use depends on your preferences. I really like the filling, so I used the full can. My husband liked these, but would have preferred to have a more bread to filling ratio. He found it to be just a little too much. Next time, I would use half the can of filling to suit his preference.