Yeast dough with oil
23 January 2026 08:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI found myself yet again consulting Mrs Molokhovets in an attempt to work out how to make dough for pirozhki when you don't have any butter (due to having used almost all of it up on Peach & White Chocolate Failure -- I'm still eating the crunchy little greasy twice-cooked portions, although two of the remaining last three appear to have welded themselves together in the freezer and may have to be eaten as a single large lump). What had not dawned on me, of course, is that the butter-free Lenten recipes are also egg-free, so not really what I was hoping for in terms of proportions of oil to flour and egg!
It was also a salutary reminder that being able to listen to a twenty-minute interview with Valentin Smirnitsky on Moscow 24 (this morning's activity of choice before I went back to sleep in order to wake at 2pm -- the Soviet Musketeers are seriously messing with my sleep schedule at the moment...) does not in fact indicate any useful degree of fluency in any other context. I still have enormous difficulty navigating that enormous cookery book... though I did manage to remember the Russian for 'dough' and 'yeast' (as opposed to the Russian terms for 'on the set' and 'actor's fee', which is the sort of context I've been acquiring vocabulary in, along with 'fence' and 'spear' courtesy of Project Zomboid :-p)
Weirdly, I apparently ended up in a completely different section of the book this time round, as I was looking through dough recipes numbered in the 200s as opposed to the 1800s mentioned last time. Possibly there are separate sections for pirog and pirozhok dough...
Anyway, I gave up on Mrs Molokhovets, which I couldn't really read and which didn't seem likely to have anything along the lines that I was looking for, and resorted to the Internet instead and a query for "Russian+dough+yeast+oil+egg". Which gave me a recipe for Russian Stuffed Rolls with a dough that seemed to have the right sort of proportions -- although it turns out that 'four cups' of flour is a very sizeable amount, about 1lb! Still, it's reasonably economical, and the extra dough can simply be frozen if necessary. I might even try her (distinctly un-Russian-sounding) filling of cabbage braised in tomato... although I took the liberty of omitting the tablespoon of sugar she put into her raised dough, given that I'm not using dried yeast in any case.
For future reference, the proportions suggested are four cups of flour and a teaspoon of salt to one cup of warm water, one egg and three tablespoons of oil (bearing in mind that I was starting from a 'lively brew' of sourdough plus 1oz flour and liquid, minus the removed portion to provide a new starter -- in other words, the mixture was wetter to start with than the one in the recipe). This gives a flexible dough that feels about right, although the proof of the pudding will be in the rising -- likely to take about 24 hours at current temperatures! I have my fingerless gloves on again (even though the room thermometer is actually well over 50, and I simply ought to get up and put on my proper thick jumper instead of draping a heavy scarf cloak-fashion around my shoulders :-p)
It was also a salutary reminder that being able to listen to a twenty-minute interview with Valentin Smirnitsky on Moscow 24 (this morning's activity of choice before I went back to sleep in order to wake at 2pm -- the Soviet Musketeers are seriously messing with my sleep schedule at the moment...) does not in fact indicate any useful degree of fluency in any other context. I still have enormous difficulty navigating that enormous cookery book... though I did manage to remember the Russian for 'dough' and 'yeast' (as opposed to the Russian terms for 'on the set' and 'actor's fee', which is the sort of context I've been acquiring vocabulary in, along with 'fence' and 'spear' courtesy of Project Zomboid :-p)
Weirdly, I apparently ended up in a completely different section of the book this time round, as I was looking through dough recipes numbered in the 200s as opposed to the 1800s mentioned last time. Possibly there are separate sections for pirog and pirozhok dough...
Anyway, I gave up on Mrs Molokhovets, which I couldn't really read and which didn't seem likely to have anything along the lines that I was looking for, and resorted to the Internet instead and a query for "Russian+dough+yeast+oil+egg". Which gave me a recipe for Russian Stuffed Rolls with a dough that seemed to have the right sort of proportions -- although it turns out that 'four cups' of flour is a very sizeable amount, about 1lb! Still, it's reasonably economical, and the extra dough can simply be frozen if necessary. I might even try her (distinctly un-Russian-sounding) filling of cabbage braised in tomato... although I took the liberty of omitting the tablespoon of sugar she put into her raised dough, given that I'm not using dried yeast in any case.
For future reference, the proportions suggested are four cups of flour and a teaspoon of salt to one cup of warm water, one egg and three tablespoons of oil (bearing in mind that I was starting from a 'lively brew' of sourdough plus 1oz flour and liquid, minus the removed portion to provide a new starter -- in other words, the mixture was wetter to start with than the one in the recipe). This gives a flexible dough that feels about right, although the proof of the pudding will be in the rising -- likely to take about 24 hours at current temperatures! I have my fingerless gloves on again (even though the room thermometer is actually well over 50, and I simply ought to get up and put on my proper thick jumper instead of draping a heavy scarf cloak-fashion around my shoulders :-p)