Zabar's Style Cinnamon Raisin Rugelach

The signature cookie of the iconic Zabar's, flakey cinnamon-raisin rugelach, in a homemade version that will make your kitchen smell like the corner of 80th and Broadway.

This post is part of the Eating New York series.

Zabar's, an upscale takeout deli and market, is an Upper West Side institution. It's strongly associated with the New York Jewish culinary landscape, and especially with baked treats, like bagels, black & whites, and, above all, rugelach. (This is in spite of the fact that Zabar's is also well known for their prosciutto.) I think of the definitive Zabar's rugelach as being squarish, squat, and absolutely, positively cinnamon raisin. (Nope, not chocolate, however much we love it.) Zabar's now ships rugelach out all over the country, and when I went looking for the product page on their website, I was perplexed by what looked like Israeli rugelach and not at all what I remembered seeing in their display. Further research determined that their kosher rugelach (which I'm going to assume is rebranded from one of the kosher bakeries) is completely different from their (not kosher certified) Fresh Baked Rugelach. The thing I had in my head is most definitely the latter, which, as advertised, looks as though it's been made by hand, being clearly rolled and sliced. And that, my friends, is what we are here to replicate: fresh baked Zabar's style cinnamon raisin rugelach.

It took some experimenting, but I knew I'd nailed it when my kitchen started to smell exactly, and I mean exactly, like walking past the corner of 80th and Broadway. The secret is in the combination of apricot jam, cinnamon, granulated and brown sugar, chopped walnuts, and golden raisins.

Preparing the dough

Rugelach dough is persnickety, to put it in a family-friendly way. Making it is easy enough—you just pulse together softened cream cheese and butter with some dry goods in the food processor—but the whole rolling it out business can be aggravating. To make it less of a pain to work with, give yourself time to chill the dough well: an hour at absolute minimum, a day ahead is even better. I have been known to fudge the chill time on cookie dough (twelve minutes basically counts as half an hour, no?), but in this case, the dough is really unfriendly without it.

Shaping and filling the cookies

When your dough is well chilled (it is, right? just checking), flour it, your work surface, and your hands very, very generously. Pick up your cold disc of dough and knead it just once or twice using your hands. It'll warm right up and become malleable enough to roll out over all that flour (thus getting flour absolutely everywhere—worth it, though). If you get a bit Type A about your baked goods, you can trim the dough so the edges are square. Otherwise, blithely ignore the ragged edges, which you'll barely see anyway, are you listening, inner perfectionist?

The rugelach filling that makes these taste like Zabar's is multi-layered. As well as cinnamon-sugar moistened by butter, it's got chopped walnuts, golden raisins, and, crucially, a layer of apricot jam. You start by spreading on the jam, then the cinnamon-sugar/nuts/raisin mixture, which you'll press down into the cookie a bit with your hands. Then you roll up the rectangle from one of the long edges.

The filling of rugelach in general and this rugelach in particular has a tendency to leak out of the cookie edges. Now that you know that this is just the way of the world, it shouldn't be upsetting (it kind of is though, see Type A tendencies above). You can minimize leaking by not slicing the cookies before baking them as I've done in the photos below. Bake them in a roll and cut apart after cooling. However, I like the way the edges turn out when the rugelach are cut before baking, so I will have to learn to tolerate the jam leakage (ahem). Theoretically, this could be prevented by making bakery-style apricot filling from dried apricots, but I think the jamminess is mandatory of the Zabar's effect. So here we are.

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A final bit of egg-and-milk wash (don't skip it), a sprinkle of reserved cinnamon-sugar on top just like Zabar's does it, and you're an Upper West Sider, at least for the time it takes to eat a cookie.