In Hungarian they call it retes (pronounced ray-tash), strudel made with fillo pastry and sweet cheese, apple or cherry filling).

Boriska Tortely has been baking retes on her small farm in Far North Queensland since the late 80s and thanks to her hens and milking cow, has many of the ingredients she needs. She even makes her own butter from the cream skimmed off the milk.

To make the cheese for the strudel filling, she warms raw milk fresh from the cow for a twenty four hour period, until it sours and solidifies. What's left after skimming off the cream is a soft, slightly sour cheese the Germans call quark. It's similar to what the Americans call bakers cheese and be eaten as a spread with salt and shallots, or garlic and chopped chives. For the pastry filling, quark is mixed with a little cream, semolina, sugar, lemon zest, eggs and a pinch of salt.

Boriska also makes a variety of other pastries, including apple or chocolate kugelhupf (yeast cake baked in a ring mould), a short pastry called tumberlina, with an apricot puree and pecan nut filling, cheese cake, walnut or pecan rolls and kipfli or vanilla crescents. She also makes homemade cottage cheese (quark) and a selection of savoury pastries too.

You can buy them from her stall at the Yungaburra markets, held in Yungaburra on the Atherton Tableland in Tropical North Queensland on the fourth Saturday of every month, from 5/6 am till noon.

Recipes:

Sweet cheese strudel (retes)