My D has been asking me to make Hamenstashen cookies. She seems to remember baking them when she was a child. I’m not sure about that since I think we made them once. I’ve looked in various cookbooks and online. Many of the recipes call for using oil versus butter. I know it’s to make the cookies parve but also several recipes say the dough made with oil is easier to work with. It goes against my first instinct to make a cookie with oil over butter. Also opinions vary over using pie filling or jam. I don’t care for prune or poppy seed filling.
Any tried and true recipes or tips?
I just wanted to say that I love the prune and poppy seed fillings, and I would not use canned “pie filling” for anything. B-)
This wonderful jam made with dried apricots would make a great filling, with or without the brandy:
http://www.geniuskitchen.com/recipe/apricot-and-brandy-jam-41143?ftab=reviews
What flavors do you have in mind?
I’ve found Joan Nathan’s recipes to be reliable, though I haven’t made these (made with butter and an unusual filling):
https://food52.com/recipes/20810-joan-nathan-s-chosen-hamantaschen
On the subject of hamentaschen, I feel the need to point out that someone has come up with the ideal version, at last:
(If you can’y access the article, it’s about a bakery that sells hamentaschen with “a creamy dark chocolate center enclosed in rich chocolate pastry”. Oh my. And they’re gluten-free and dairy-free!)
I’m not a big fan of the poppyseed or prune versions. You know what would be good? Nutella! But those chocolate ones MommaJ posted look darn good!
The only thing I’ve made with oil instead of butter is mooncakes which I learned to make from a Chinese grad student at Caltech who had been forced to be a baker during the Cultural Revolution. They are yummy!
I opened 2 of my Jewish cookbooks. One uses butter, the other margarine.
1/4 pound butter
1 cup sugar
3 egg yolks
1/2 pint sour cream
3 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/4 tsp orange zest
Apricot filling:
1/2 lb dried apricots
1 cup water
11/4 CS. Sugar
Pineapple compote:
1 c sugar
1 c water
1 medium pineapple
I also have cherry recipe
The recipe I’ve been using for years uses oil. It’s the only cookie recipe that I have that uses oil instead of butter. I use olive oil. For the filing I use a canned fruit filling - the brand is Solo. It’s in the baking aisle of my grocery store. We also like using chocolate chips for the filling.
She wants apricot and cherry. Apricot i think I’ll make from dried fruit. Not sure what to use for cherry. @bookworm can you share you’re cherry recipe?
@bookreader I’m glad to hear that someone has used the oil recipe from what I’m reading the oil dough is easier to handle. Though still haven’t decided which way to go.
I like chocolate but I prefer fruit in this type of cookie.
This time of year, your best bet might be frozen cherries. Maybe with some dried cherries thrown in.
The easy cherry is the canned, excluding a all that sweet stuff around each cherry. ( use a strainer). I will go thru my mom’s recipes and find how we made sour cherries into a filling. I’m just too tired now. We had several sour cherry trees on our lawn, so we adjusted recipes to fit our fruit.
They sell dried tart cherries at Costco if you want to use those to make the filling.
Although I haven’t made Hamenstashen, I have made a number of different types of cookies using grapeseed oil, Crisco shortening (vegetable) or coconut oil. Depending on the cookie, the texture may be a little different than when made with butter. But, there are some cookies (such as chocolate chip) that my family actually prefers made with something other than butter.
@mom60 - the cherry filling I use is just the Solo brand canned cherry filling. I’ve never made a fruit filling from scratch.
Another tip is to keep the dough chilled before rolling it out. I find that it’s harder to roll out when it’s at room temperature.
I couldn’t find the Solo brand cherry filling. I bought what my store had. I also have some unsweetened dried cherries that I could try to rehydrate but I’m not sure. I cooked the dried apricots with sugar and orange juice to make an apricot filling. I couldn’t decide on what dough to use so I’m making two. One with oil that I found on the internet and the other Joan Nathan’s recipe with butter. I’m making the dough today and my D will come over tomorrow and we will roll and bake the cookies.
My secretary used to make great Hamantaschen. I have seen small jars of fig preserves at Whole Foods, and think that figs would work really well as a filling–probably inauthentic, but better than prunes, in my opinion.
I made Hamanatschen the other day with my sister’s recipe - I don’t know the origin but it used butter, not oil. For fillings I used nutella, fig jam, apricot preserves and a sour cherry spread I found in a local store. The cookie is moist and buttery and the fillings are great, according to my taste-testers! I couldn’t find prune or poppy filling at that store, so I improvised and everyone seems quite happy! @QuantMech, the fig jam worked really well.
Reporting back in. Fillings- we used fig jam, canned cherries, apricot filling made from dried apricots, raspberry spread and apricot preserves. The dried apricot filling was a bit thick. We found we preferred it if we mixed it with a bit of apricot preserves. The cherries were packed in water and my D felt next time we should aim for cherry pie filling as it didn’t get gooey enough for her. I attempted to make some cherry filling from dried cherries by cooking dried cherries in fresh squeezed orange juice with a bit of sugar. The cherries were unsweetened and I did not add enough sugar and it came out way too tart. We didn’t use it and I think it will work on baked chicken.
The dough. I used Tory Avey recipe for the oil based dough. It had orange zest in the dough and that added a nice flavor. The dough is softer and easier to handle. A plus is it doesn’t need to chill. It made a very crisp cookie and the taste was good. My H preferred this dough. My D went back and forth and couldn’t decide which one she liked better.
The butter recipe was Joan Nathan’s. You could taste the butter in the finished product and while the cookie was crisp it was a different type of crisp. I preferred this recipe. I also find I preferred working with the butter dough. My D who isn’t a cook or baker found the oil dough easier to form the triangles.
Of course my D who wanted to make the cookies only took home a small amount leaving me with a lot of cookies. I am cutting way back on sweets and carbs. I guess I’ll freeze them.
It was a nice afternoon spent with my D. In the end I think the recipes don’t taste all that different from each other.
Interesting about her thinking the oil-based bought was easier to form…I’ve had issues with that in the past, but this year my 3" circles were quite easy to manipulate, for some reason. Of the entire batch, only 2-3 opened up during baking. I also made a gluten-free batch using a commercially available gluten-free baking flour and my non-GF D said they were delicious…a little different than the others but that they didn’t taste obviously GF.