As part of the two-week tourist-humanitarian activity ‘September in the Heart’, the ‘Strudel Festival’ was held on Sunday in Jaškovo near Ozalj, a brand established in 2015 when an unbroken Guinness World Record for the longest strudel, measuring 1,479 meters, was set there.
This event has made Jaškovo a destination for strudels and indigenous gastronomy.
Organized by Restaurant Žganjer, competitions are held for amateurs and professionals for the best strudel made from the same ingredients. Jury member for the professional category, chef Stevo Karapandža, states that their criteria include beautifully, thinly, and uniformly rolled dough, without thickened parts, evenly distributed filling, just the right amount of filling, everything being tasty, and well-baked both on the bottom and top.
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He adds that everyone claims strudel as their own dessert, indigenous, while in Tyrol, a part of Italy and Austria, they make ‘Tyrolean strudel’ with puff pastry, and in Germany and Switzerland, it is also a ‘national’ dish, as it is in our regions.
– It is difficult to delve into history and see all those influences, who brought what to whom during migrations and conquests, said Karapandža.
Chef Branko Ognjenović, also a jury member, held a small culinary workshop on how to prepare strudel in a slightly different way, calling it ‘turned strudel’, made from puff pastry.
The coordinator of the Strudel Festival, Lidija Žganjer, says that strudel has been her love since childhood, when she prepared homemade strudel with her grandmother, but that this event is a broader story, where forty exhibitors can showcase their traditional indigenous products and even sell them at their stands.
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The mayor of Ozalj, Gordana Lipšinić, expressed satisfaction that Jaškovo, and thus Ozalj, are successfully branding themselves as a tourist destination, supported by the City of Zagreb, personally by Mayor Milan Bandić and Ana Rukavina Stavljenić, as well as participants from the Sisak-Moslavina County, as this promotes the Ozalj region with its gastronomy as a whole, especially as a wine region.
