Sweet pasta
18 September 2020 02:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI made Ukrainian vareniki -- basically pasta filled with fruit and served as a sweet dish.
Much more successful than my one and only attempt at pel'meni, which stuck together, ripped open, and were incredibly stodgy...
This recipe uses a yeast dough instead of an egg pasta dough, which as with raised pies has the advantage of being extremely stretchy and un-sticky -- although when they tell you to oil the steamer, they mean it! I wiped mine over with an oily tissue, and the vareniki still tried to stick.
Instead of the cherries recommended in my Russian cookbook, these pasta shapes are filled with (unsweetened) blackberries and elderberries, the former partially defrosted, the latter not at all since they were an emergency measure after I ran out of defrosted blackberries, and they are brushed with honey instead of served with cherry and sour cream sauce. And they are steamed instead of boiled, although Olia Hercules does admit that in the Ukraine they would originally have been boiled also.
The elderberries work a little better size/shape-wise, I think; blackberries are a suggested substitution in the recipe for strawberries cut into pieces, but several round berries wrapped up together leave rather more airspace than chopped fruit would have done, and the result with elderberries is probably closer to the intended outcome. I must say that I can well imagine this with hot strawberries and sour cream, and the result would be quite different and very tasty!
I thought I'd steamed two portions (13 vareniki in total) after freezing the rest of the dough, but after eating this bowlful I went back and ate the other one ;-p After all, it's a very lean dough, basically only 4 ounces of flour with a tiny amount of oil, plus a literal handful of fruit as filling, and a teaspoon of honey between two bowls...
I'm not sure how important the raising element of the yeast dough is; the recipe tells you to add a little bicarbonate of soda at the last minute as well (which will have pretty much exhausted itself in the frozen portion, I should think), which suggests that the pasta is intended to rise in the cooking, but you wouldn't want it to swell much and in fact it doesn't. I have a feeling that the yeast liquid is mainly being used to create a flexible dough here.
Much more successful than my one and only attempt at pel'meni, which stuck together, ripped open, and were incredibly stodgy...
This recipe uses a yeast dough instead of an egg pasta dough, which as with raised pies has the advantage of being extremely stretchy and un-sticky -- although when they tell you to oil the steamer, they mean it! I wiped mine over with an oily tissue, and the vareniki still tried to stick.
Instead of the cherries recommended in my Russian cookbook, these pasta shapes are filled with (unsweetened) blackberries and elderberries, the former partially defrosted, the latter not at all since they were an emergency measure after I ran out of defrosted blackberries, and they are brushed with honey instead of served with cherry and sour cream sauce. And they are steamed instead of boiled, although Olia Hercules does admit that in the Ukraine they would originally have been boiled also.
The elderberries work a little better size/shape-wise, I think; blackberries are a suggested substitution in the recipe for strawberries cut into pieces, but several round berries wrapped up together leave rather more airspace than chopped fruit would have done, and the result with elderberries is probably closer to the intended outcome. I must say that I can well imagine this with hot strawberries and sour cream, and the result would be quite different and very tasty!
I thought I'd steamed two portions (13 vareniki in total) after freezing the rest of the dough, but after eating this bowlful I went back and ate the other one ;-p After all, it's a very lean dough, basically only 4 ounces of flour with a tiny amount of oil, plus a literal handful of fruit as filling, and a teaspoon of honey between two bowls...
I'm not sure how important the raising element of the yeast dough is; the recipe tells you to add a little bicarbonate of soda at the last minute as well (which will have pretty much exhausted itself in the frozen portion, I should think), which suggests that the pasta is intended to rise in the cooking, but you wouldn't want it to swell much and in fact it doesn't. I have a feeling that the yeast liquid is mainly being used to create a flexible dough here.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-18 04:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-18 05:17 pm (UTC)I don't recommend it!
This experiment in pasta as a pudding course was rather more successful. I've got another half of the dough left, and might try again with some frozen raspberries -- properly defrosted first, this time. You could probably just put home-made jam in, as well.
I'm also intrigued by the Ukrainian recipe for meringue with noodles (the meringue using the egg white left over from making the pasta), though I'm not sure the effect would be quite the same using cheap mixed nuts (i.e. mainly peanuts) as opposed to pecan nuts...
https://www.thefinercookie.com/recipe/3549/noodle-cookies-russian-pecan-meringues
no subject
Date: 2020-09-18 06:55 pm (UTC)The ripping open problem is the reason why I prefer eating very small pelmeni, which, even when torn, just don't look and feel as gross as even well-cooked pelmeni of normal size.
It's ironical that I've recently developed interest in cooking, but mostly avoid Eastern European cuisines - way too difficult to cook, and the taste is often too soft and bland for me.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-19 11:42 pm (UTC)Cherries are long since out of season here; I bought a box of late strawberries and tried them in my second batch of dough, but I think my first attempt was actually better. The chopped-up bits of strawberry had hard lumpy edges that jutted out, rather than fitting better than the round berries, and it didn't help that I was too lazy to measure out the minimum amount of water to fit under the trivet in the pressure cooker, so misjudged it and used too much -- which meant the second batch of vareniki effectively got boiled rather than steamed, and stuck together even worse :-p
Still tasty with honey and yoghurt.
Eastern European cuisine doesn't seem particularly bland from the perspective of this end of the continent, although that may be since traditional English cooking has itself been accused of being irremediably bland! It involves a lot more sour and fermented flavours than we are used to, from rye flour to smetana and sauerkraut -- and of course a lot of what I knew as 'Russian' food was Soviet cooking, including all the Caucasian republics.
The contrast I mainly notice is that recipes often tend to involve cooking all the ingredients separately beforehand and then layering/mixing them together before heating them through (compare a pirog to the similar Cornish pasty, in which the raw ingredients are expected to cook inside the casing and create gravy).