Recipes: Culinaria: Russia by Marian Trutter
Music: War and Peace - Prokofiev
Piroshki
Russian Yeast Dough1 1/2 oz dry yeast
1 cup milk
2 tsp sugar
Generous 1 lb flour (the internet claims this is about 3 1/2 cups)
2 egg yolks
8 1/2 tbsp butter
1 pinch salt
Beaten egg for sealing and glazing
Dissolve the yeast into 7 tablespoons of lukewarm milk (this is most important, if the milk is cold it will clump up and probably damage the whole process). Add the sugar, cover and leave for 15 minutes. Stir half the flour into the yeast mixture with a wooden spoon to make a "pre-dough"; mine came out more or less dry after this. Cover and leave in a warm place for about an hour or until it has doubled in size. Beat the egg and butter until frothy, add salt and remaining milk and work into a smooth mass. Add the remaining flour and knead on a floured surface until the dough no longer sticks.
Once the dough is ready, you can roll it out until it's about 1/4 in thick and cut it into rounds using a glass cup. I think I make mine a bit too thin...
For the fillings, the book has a super long list of things that people bake into piroshki. I opted for the following 4, the "recipes" for which I more or less made up. I'm just going to list ingredients and leave the proportions up to your imagination.
Mushroom and Onion - Brown onions in butter then add mushrooms and cook until almost all the liquid is removed.
Potato and Curd Cheese - for this I once again squeezed all the liquid out of the American cottage cheese and mixed it in roughly equal proportions with the mashed potatoes. I added just a tiny bit of cream to make it a bit easier to manage. An important note about the potato filled piroshki, they need to have some kind of holes poked into them, or decorative slashes added to their tops, otherwise all the yummy potato cheese filling explodes out of them.
Sauerkraut and Onion - I browned onion in butter and added slightly more sauerkraut than onion.
Ground Chicken - kitchen helper Jay browned onions, garlic and ground chicken in a frying pan and I ran it through the food processor.
Fill each round with about a tablespoon (or less) of filling, brush the edges with beaten egg and seal. Brush the sealed piroshki with beaten egg and bake at 425 degrees for about 10 minutes or until golden brown. Serve hot with sour cream and sauteed onions. The dough will make about 60 piroshki.
This was the first batch; I forgot to brush them with egg, and they were a tiny bit over cooked (the original recipe said 20 minutes - I took these out after about 13 minutes) but they were very tasty - and you can see what I meant about the potato filling coming out. The second batch came out beautifully and I was too busy eating to remember to take any pictures of it.
Another note about making piroshki, at first I was sealing them by hand, which I'm not very good at, then I remembered that years ago, I'd bought a dumpling press at a market in Chinatown. That made my life much easier and made piroshki production a lot faster. I also suggest making the fillings ahead. It's exhausting trying to do it all in one night - so exhausting that I shoved everything in the fridge and put it all together the next day.
Yablonchna Babka
(Apple Bake)
1 1/3 lb apples, peeled, cored, and chopped into small pieces
Lemon juice
9 tbsp sugar
4 eggs separated
1/2 cup sour cream
1 cup flour
1 tsp cinnamon
Pinch of Salt
Butter for greasing the pan
Confectioners' sugar and fresh apple slices for garnish (optional)
Preheat oven to 340 degrees and grease a small baking dish with butter Coat the apples with a bit of lemon juice immediately to prevent browning. Beat the sugar, egg yolks, and sour cream in a bowl until frothy. Beat in the flour, cinnamon, and salt. Hand mix in the apples. Beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form and gently fold into the rest of the batter. Bake for 25 minutes or until golden brown.
This recipe has so much egg in it, it's almost a custard. I didn't have any extra apples left for garnish and I don't like confectioners' sugar, so I just ate mine plain. Rich and delicious.
About the book:
At one point in the novel, Pierre starts to feel as though he must "do something." So he goes off to watch the battle of Borodino. Thinking he will be out of the way, he lands himself smack in the middle of the target for the heaviest French fire. He nearly dies there, is almost captured by the French, almost kills his would-be captor, and isn't heard from by anybody for many days after. He feels himself an utter coward for running away, remembering how earlier he had seen soldiers marching toward the battle exchanging witty banter with the wounded being carted back. He wonders (as do I) how they can continue marching forward when they see the mirror image of their future selves in the wounded and dying. Another of the many ways in which war makes no sense to me.
From having had the honor of eating these leftovers yesterday with some Chinese food to supplement (the Chinese paled in taste comparison, but we needed some greens), I have to say that the mushroom-onion-butter ones were my favorite. I never got to try to sauerkraut ones, but I guess next time. I found it interesting how bready they were compared with the Polish kind, but they were super tasty. Keep on!
ReplyDeleteI still have some of the fillings in my freezer and Ms Wolfe has promised that we'll make Varenyky out of them soon.
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