Merry Christmas, bloggies! I thought long and hard about a quintessential Jewish recipe to make for you this Christmas. Something festive, seasonal and of course tasty. Then I had it- I knew exactly the meal to make! It’s too perfect, really! But, you will have to wait just a bit longer to enjoy, as I am saving it for next week. Trust me, it is worth the wait! Instead, I bring you noodle kugel. Kugel is traditionally served as a sweet addition to your brunch. As a young Jew, you could make me pretty gosh darn happy by serving up some bagels, lox, a Sunday New York Times and kugel. These days, my brunches typically consist of a plate of bacon (sorry Kosher kids!) and enough mimosas to sedate a donkey. But traditionally, it is all about the kugel. Let’s get cooking!
Here is all you need to make your own kugel. If you scroll below you will see three different versions. Don’t stress. There is an original version, a healthier version, and one with more custard and fewer noodles that is a more custard-y less noodle-y version. I healthified mine up a bit, but included the original measurements below so you can choose your version- a bit o butter, or a whole lotta butter. I trust you will choose wisely.
Why yes that is Luke Perry on my kitchen wall. Thank you for noticing. First step, cook noodles according to directions until al dente.
Mix up your milk, eggs, sugar, vanilla and salt. You can use a whisk for mixing, but using a hand mixer will give you frothier base and fluffier kugel.
Then, add your sour cream or yogurt.
Mmm saucy.
Then, stir in your cottage cheese.
After your noodles are cooked, drain well and return to the pot. Then, it’s decision time. Add a little butter, or a whole lotta butter. Whatever your little heart desires. Buttahhh!
Toss noodles into your mixture, and combine well.
This is looking pretty fantastic if I do say so myself!
Now time for the good stuff. The sweet, crunchy, delectable topping. First, crush up your cornflakes. You can use a roller, or crunch in a plastic baggie.
I don’t know where I got that utensil, or what the heck it is for, but it does a fine job crushing cereal. Mix your cornflakes with cinnamon, sugar and butter.
I used my hands for this part. Don’t tell anyone.
Transfer noodles into a pan, and sprinkle with topping. I recommend using a glass pan like this one
Bake for one hour until golden. Brunch is served. You won’t even miss the bacon.
Trust me, your guests won’t stop kvelling.
Here are three versions for you: Classic, Healthy, and Custard.
A classic version and a healthy version here. Scroll down for the custard version.
Noodle Kugel
Ingredients
- Noodle ingredients:
- 1 pound wide egg noodles
- 1/2 cup butter healthy version, 1/6 cup
- 1 cup whole milk healthy version, low fat
- 4 large eggs yolks are healthy! And give texture to your kugel.
- 3/4 cup sugar healthy version, 1/2 cup
- 2 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1- pound container sour cream healthy version, Greek yogurt
- 1- pound container cottage cheese healthy version, low fat
- Topping ingredients:
- 3 cups crushed cornflakes
- 3 tablespoons sugar
- 1 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
- 3 tablespoons soft butter cut into bits (this topping is so tasty, I shunned all healthy versions)
Instructions
- Preheat to 350 degrees F.
- Butter a 9x13x2 inch glass or ceramic dish and set aside.
- Cook noodles according to directions until al dente.
- Drain well, then return to the pot and add amount of butter of your choosing, totally coating the noodles.
- Mix together milk, eggs, sugar, vanilla, and salt.
- Then stir in sour cream or Greek yogurt.
- Lastly, mix in cottage cheese.
- Combine your noodles with the mixture, and transfer into the dish.
- To make the topping, toss together cornflakes, sugar, cinnamon and butter and sprinkle evenly over noodles.
- Bake kugel for 1 hour until golden brown. Let stand at least 5-10 minutes before serving. Serve warm or at room temperature.
Noodle Kugel
Ingredients
- For kugel:
- 1/2 pound 8 ounces noodles
- 1/4 pound butter 1 stick, plus more for buttering pan
- 1/2 pound cream cheese softened
- 1 pound cottage cheese
- 1 pint sour cream (16 oz)
- 5 extra large eggs
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 1/2 cup sugar depends on how sweet you like it
- For topping:
- 2 cups crushed Special K or other flakes
- 2 tablespoons or whatever you like! brown sugar
- 2 tablespoons melted butter
Instructions
- Preheat to 350 degrees F.
- Butter a 9x13x2 inch glass or ceramic dish and set aside.
- Cook noodles according to directions until al dente.
- Drain well, then return to the pot. Add the butter immediately to melt. In a separate bowl, mix together the other kugel ingredients with a hand beater. Add to the noodles, and pour into the 9x13 dish.
- To make the topping, toss together ingredients and sprinkle evenly over noodles.
- Bake for 45 minutes. Let stand at least 5-10 minutes before serving. Serve warm or at room temperature.
YUM!!! Should I be concerned about my arteries, though?? Oh, never mind, nosh away!
If you are worried about your arteries, try my healthy version. If not, butter is better!
Do you cover the kugel while baking? Crazy how most of us are still looking for the perfect kugel recipe, when in fact our mother’s or bubbie’s was the best!! Cannot wait to try this one and tell my cousin Adele that she has met her match!!
Nope I cook it uncovered. Let me know how you like it!
Thank you and will let you know how it turns out. Not sure when the next kugel will be made. “Keep the kugel koming”
I made this for my family’s passover seder last night, and everyone loved it! I even asked my mom if she would change anything about it, and she said “no, its perfect”! mom-approved! thanks for the recipe!
Awesome!! Glad you liked it.
I think the tool you are using to crush cornflakes is a rubber brayer. Used in stamping and block printing, available in most craft stores. Just thought I’d share for those who haven’t figured out where to find your awesome cornflake crusher.
HAHA good to know! It was advertised as a pastry roller but that makes more sense!
My favorite kugel recipe!! Always comes out perfectly and have made everybody who’s had it absolutely love it. Thank you! 🙂
Aw that makes my day! Can’t wait to tell Bubbe.
Thank you! This is the same recipe my mom made us!
Could I use a metal disposable pan? I want to take it to work for a Potluck. And I don’t have a class or ceramic dish at the moment I’ve made this kugel before and everyone loves it.
Hi Rachel- sure, that would work. Thanks!
I use crushed Frosted Flakes with melted butter & brown sugar. My family & all others love the topping.
Great idea!
If I wanted to make this for Break the Fast a few days from now, are there any adjustments you’d recommend? Can I bake it as stated then keep in the fridge for a few days before reheating? Or leave the topping off til I reheat?
I would bake as is and reheat covered, but uncover the last few minutes so the top will crisp up a little. Enjoy!
Can I make this tonight, refrigerate it overnight, and then bake it in the morning? Or better to bake it tonight and then reheat it tomorrow morning?
I would do the first option if you want it warm with a crunchy top! It’s best right out of the oven. But cold you can do either way.
Can I leave out the cottage cheese?
It will be dry but you could try adding more of another wet ingredient instead.
Kugel is a “PARVE” food item that is generally eaten on Friday night and Shabbat day. A Friday night Shabbat main meal and also a Shabbat day meal in the majority of homes throughout the world is a meat meal, your “Dairy” kugel wouldn’t exactly fit in. It would be great for those that are not meat eaters and have dairy meals on Shabbat, holidays and especially on Shavuot.
Hi Alan- not sure where you got the idea that noodle kugel is only parve. While parve kugels exist, and I have parve potato and vegetable ones on my blog, this type of noodle kugel is extremely common and popular. It’s one of the top recipes on my blog.
When the word kugel first appeared in Webster’s Dictionary in the early twentieth century, it was defined as “a suet pudding,” a characterization derived from similarities between kugel and British steamed puddings. Later, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary updated the definition to “a baked pudding.” Baking, however, was actually a late step in the kugel’s evolution. For the kugel’s (kuglen plural) origin lay not in a casserole, but rather as bread dumplings in a stew pot.
By the 12th century, the concept of dumplings spread from China along the Silk Road to Italy then Germany, around the same time that cholent reached Germany from Spain by way of France. Within a century or so, German cooks began dropping a bread batter containing a little egg as a binder into the center of the Shabbat stew, the dumpling developing a rich flavor and texture as it simmered overnight and, after morning services, served warm alongside the stew for lunch.
Then emulating an emerging German practice of steaming puddings in a clay pot instead of in a stew or in intestines, Jewish housewives began cooking the dumpling in a kugeltopf –kugel was the Middle High German for “ball” and topf meant “jar/pot”– a commonplace small rounded Teutonic earthenware jar. The kugeltopf was placed in the top of the stew, the steamy environment keeping the batter moist and preventing burning. This not only transformed the batter into a pudding with the potential for greater versatility, but also gave rise to a new name. In order to differentiate the pudding from the stew, people began calling it variously weckschalet (weck was German for “bread roll”), semmelkugel (semmel/zemmel was another Teutonic bread roll), and schaletkugel, a reference to the resulting round shape. In western Europe, these puddings are still called schalet, while in eastern Europe, kugel became the generic term for all these puddings. Whether pronounced kugel (by Poles and Lithuanians), koogle (by Germans), or keegal (by Galitzianers), this dish ranks high in the pantheon of Jewish foods.
As the kugel came out of the Shabbat cholent, the rudimentary bread dumplings gradually evolved into an array of dishes. Onions, ubiquitous in Ashkenazic cookery, were sautéed and added for extra flavor. Gribenes, cracklings made while rendering schmaltz, provided another possible flavor element. The popularization of sugar in 17th century Europe led to sweet puddings. The common denominators of all true kugels are a starch base, eggs (or egg substitute), and fat, without the addition of water or other liquids. If the dish lacks any of the basic ingredients, it is technically a casserole or cake, not a kugel.
Kugel achieved new gastronomic heights when cooks substituted farfel and noodles and, on Passover, matza for the bread batter. The Frankfort rabbi, Joseph Yuspa Hahn (1570-1637) in Yosif Ometz, a collection of local customs, mentioned three types of schalets: weck, vermicelles(Western Yiddish for “noodles”), and matza. Hanh also instructs, “Do not forget to taste your schalet on Friday (before the onset of the Shabbat) to test whether it be properly cooked!” By the sixteenth century, rice kugels, typically reserved for special occasions, emerged in parts of eastern Europe, influenced by the Ottoman advances into Europe and their introduction of numerous Middle Eastern foods. Potatoes, after their popularization in the mid-19th century, provided an inexpensive and filling kugel, subsequently becoming the predominant type in the impoverished shtetls of eastern Europe. Whence the popular Yiddish folk song, “Sunday potatoes, Monday potatoes, Tuesday and Wednesday potatoes, Thursday and Friday potatoes, but Shabbat, for a change, a potato kugel.”
Beginning in the late 1700s, groups of Chasidim and students of the Vilna Gaon began moving to Israel, bringing with them the traditions of eastern Europe, including clothing and foods. In Jerusalem, they developed a distinctive noodle kugel, a hybrid of traditional salt-and-pepper noodle kugel and sweet noodle kugel, featuring a tantalizing contrast of ground black pepper and caramelized sugar, Yerushalmi kugel.
During the Middle Ages, only some wealthy families owned a home oven. Most foods were cooked on the hearth over an open fire, while baked foods had to be lugged to the town bakery or to the occasional private home oven, typically using the facilities for a fee. In addition, temperatures were difficult to regulate in those wood-burning brick or clay ovens and baked goods had to be carefully watched during the entire baking time. On the other hand, the temperature of stews or water in a pot could be reliably controlled. Consequently, for most of history, cooking was usually performed directly over a fire (roasting, braising, boiling, steaming, and poaching) and kugels were commonly steamed. In this vein, the first Jewish cookbook in English, The Jewish Manuel by Judith Montefiore(London, 1846), which contains the first record of the word kugel in English, offered a recipe for “Kugel and Commean,” (hamin) entailing a sweetened and spiced bread mixture in a covered “quart basin” steamed in a meat-and-bean stew. Similarly, Esther Levy, of German roots, in the first American Jewish Cookbook, Jewish Cookery (Philadelphia, 1871), included a recipe for “Coogle, Or Pudding, and Peas and Beans,” consisting of a sweetened noodle mixture steamed in a covered basin set in a soupy cholent.
Technology played an essential role in creating the kugel’s predominant modern form, particularly in America. With the popularization of the home oven in the mid-19th century, kugels suddenly shifted from the stew pot to baking it in a separate shallow container. The kugel, as we now know it, a baked casserole pudding, had arrived. Baking the kugel in an oven had another consequence, changing it from being primarily a Shabbat lunch dish and accompaniment to the cholent to one also served as a side dish for Friday night dinner and even during the weekday. [Sorry, but no dairy kugels at the origin of the kugel as that was a later culinary discovery]
Wow I am not sure what point you are trying to make by copying and pasting Wikipedia spam onto my blog. I never said dairy kugel was the first or only kugel. Of course recipes similar to mine did not exist before cream cheese was invented in the late 1800’s! Like I said, I have parve kugel recipes on my blog too. What is your point?
I make this recipe every rosh hashana, but we always
have left overs! Can we freeze this and what is the best way to do it?
Thank you
Kugel isn’t the best frozen as it can get mushy, but you can try wrapped well in foil.