Kugel Ahoy!

Besides being Yom Kippur (otherwise known as the most important day of the Jewish year), today is also a big day because it’s the day I finally fulfilled my good Jewish girl destiny and made a kugel for the very first time.

What is a kugel? A kugel is basically a giant barge of a casserole that only a hearty Jewish grandmother could come up with. The basic equation is starch + cheese + egg = deliciousness. The thing about kugel (as opposed to, say, mac and cheese, or potatoes au gratin) is that there is usually a sizable amount of sugar in there, too, making the dish eligible to be either a side dish or a dessert.

Like many things I write about here, kugel never really appealed to me before I made it myself. It often appears at buffets as a gummy, overly sweet brick. Make it yourself, though, and you’ll see that it is in fact a wonder of creation, so rich, so delicately sweet, so incredibly buttery that one serving alone will give you something to atone for — in the form of running — for at least a week.

After much googling, I settled on Deb from Smitten Kitchen‘s recipe for kugel, which really is probably where I should have just gone in the first place, since Food Junta has such a food blog crush on her. It’s her Mom‘s recipe, which makes me love it all the more, but really I picked it because it was the simplest recipe I found. The only change I made was sprinkling cinnamon over the whole shebang, to add some color, to give some complexity to the sweetness, and because the smell of cinnamon baking for an hour or so is just heavenly. (You can see my post on baking challah last Yom Kippur for more on that.)

Next time, I think I’ll try a savory kugel. They exist, they’ve just been inexplicably bullied out of the spotlight by the sweet ones (the explanation I like best is that the sweet kugel best simulates the actual breakfast meal, which we miss today because we’re fasting). The savory one will be of my own creation, basically this one minus the sugar, plus lots of sauteed onions, plus cayenne and paprika. Mmm.

I will be serving this one with roasted potatoes, onions, and asparagus; a big salad; and, just to undo any Jew cred I got by making kugel, a curried roast pork tenderloin, with the homemade applesauce from last week. Sweet kugel is often made even sweeter by adding raisins or preserves, but the applesauce is enough for me.

(Note: Al Franken, if you’re reading this, you are more than welcome to come to my break-fast supper.)

Simplest Noodle Kugel

Makes one 9×13 inch pan of kugel

Adapted from Smitten Kitchen

Ingredients

- 1 pound wide egg noodles
- 8 eggs
- 2 cups sugar
- 2 pounds full-fat cottage cheese, creamed or large curd
- 2 sticks (1 cup or 8 ounces) melted butter
- 2 teaspoons vanilla
- Dash of salt

- Cinnamon (to sprinkle over the top)

1. Preheat oven to 350º F.
2. Bring a LARGE pot of slightly salted water to boil. Parboil the noodles (five to seven minutes – not until they are perfectly al dente, but drained once softened).
3. In a very large bowl beat eggs until fluffy. Add the sugar gradually, then the cottage cheese, margarine or butter and vanilla. Deb from Smitten Kitchen got her mixture super fluffy, with the help of a handheld beater. Having only a whisk, mine was pretty gloppy; the end results were fine, though.
4. Stir the drained noodles into the bowl, or – if your bowl isn’t big enough – you can combine the noodles and the egg mixture straight in the pan.
5. Pour into a 9×13-inch pan. Generously sprinkle cinnamon on top.
6. Bake for 1 ½ hours, or until kugel is set. You can tell if it’s set by giving it a little jiggle. Does it move way too much? Then it’s not set. The top will be very brown and a little crunchy (it’s supposed to be like that), and butter will be bubbling out the sides (maybe we could cut back on the butter a smidge…). If you’re feeling nervous about when to take it out, I’d say err on the side of caution and leave it in for 1 ½ hours – nothing terrible will happen. But ovens vary, so yours could be done as soon as an hour later.