Sour cream crescents

by | Sep 8, 2016 | Breads, buns & biscuits

Besides bread rolls crescents are the most popular bakery products in Hungary. The number of crescent types is infinite, they can be varied in many ways. The following recipe is very simple, though it takes a little time but is well worth the wait. These crescents melt in your mouth.

Sour cream crescents
Sour cream crescents – photo: zserbo.com

Ingredients:

  • 750 g (~6 cups) flour
  • 40 g (~1 1/2 oz) fresh yeast (4 tsp dry yeast)
  • 1 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1/2 tsp sugar
  • 300 ml (~1 1/4 cups) lukewarm milk
  • 3 heaping tbsp sour cream
  • 6 tbsp oil

Place all ingredients in a mixing bowl and knead into a smooth dough. Cover and leave it to rest until it doubles in size, it takes about 50 minutes.

Turn out the dough onto a floured surface and divide into 10-12 equal pieces. Form them into balls and let them rise for 10 minutes. Roll out a dough ball into a thin square, then roll it up diagonally and curve it into a crescent. Place onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Repeat the process with the remaining dough balls.

Cover the crescents with a kitchen towel and leave them to rest for 25-30 minutes. Brush the top of the crescents with water and bake them in an oven preheated to 200°C / 392°F for 20 minutes or until golden brown.

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2 Comments

  1. Thanks for the recipe. I plan to make it very soon. One question: 750 grams of flour seems a lot to produce 10 kifli. Are these very large kifli, or perhaps, this much flour should make more than 10-12? I would think that much flour might produce around 2x that amount. Since they are best eaten same day, I would scale this recipe to make 6-8 kifli, but I think that would be not more than 350g flour. But I may be wrong. Thank you!

    • Hello Al, My crescents are 20-25 cm long (similar to store-bought kifli made by professional bakers) and usually eaten for breakfast, not at once. After baking when they are cool, I freeze them, so I always have fresh kifli. It’s up to your decision how big crescents you want to make, if you prefer smaller ones, feel free to reduce the quantity of flour.

Hungarian cottage cheese

This is what Hungarian túró looks like

You often ask me what kind of cottage cheese (or curd cheese or farmer's cheese - call it what you want) I use in the recipes. In Hungary the store-bought cottage cheese is dry and crumbly as you can see in the picture. So if a recipe calls for túró, I mean this type. If you can't obtain túró, you can try to make your own from whole milk. Click on the link below.

Metric system vs cup

In Hungary metric units are in use, all the recipes on this website are based on this system, so a kitchen scale is necessary. Since I’m not familiar with cup as a measurement unit, I convert grams to cups by using an online converter. The values in brackets, therefore, are only approximate volumes, so, please, double-check them before you start cooking.

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