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)
no subject
Date: 2026-01-30 12:03 am (UTC)I know that I was very taken aback by the absolute ubiquity of air travel in all that vintage Russian footage; they clearly regard flights of hundreds of miles as being as routine as a trip on the bus (commuting on a regular basis seven hundred miles from Moscow down to Odessa and back for a single day's filming, for example, or flying from Vladivostok to Kiev for a week's holiday with your wife). In a vast country, once the technology had been invented to make that sort of travel convenient for human existence, why would you not use it, after all? (Or as my hostess said disapprovingly in the south of Russia in the 1990s when presented with cosmetics labelled "Not tested on animals", why were they not tested? :-p)
And I admit to being a little shocked at the sheer air-mileage that Smekhov and his wife routinely and presumably unthinkingly clock up in their day-to-day lives: a week's engagement in Israel, a week in the Caucasus, a single night's performance in Germany, a trip to see old friends and relatives in the USA, back to Moscow, a performance in Siberia several time-zones to the east (affected by jet-lag), back for another in St Petersburg and off to Paris... artistes have always travelled internationally, at least since the 19th century, but the aeroplane makes it possible to do so on a dizzying basis. (And so far as I can gather most modern opera stars, for example, do just that, doing big-name guest roles in country after country rather than having a 'home' theatre and opera company and performing different productions there.)
If it's part of your normal way of life you *don't* think about it-- you can't-- any more than I angst over the poor little baby moo-cows every time I drink milk.
But what I don't get is why anyone would *want* to go to Dubai at all by any means of transport if they didn't have to.... I mean, it's one thing if you were born there and presumably fond of the place, but why undergo such a climate voluntarily? I utterly fail to see the appeal -- I saw somebody's holiday video from Dubai recently, and they were pushing their pushchair and trailing toddlers along a grey concrete strip filled with roaring traffic and lined with skyscrapers (and saying how wonderful it was). I can't imagine any more awful way to spend a week abroad, out of all the places in the world that you could choose to go to...!
no subject
Date: 2026-01-30 11:55 am (UTC)It's become normal for them.
I try and keep my milk consumption low - I had actually gone entirely over to oatmilk, but I'm trying to gain weight to combat the Diabetes weight loss, and Keffir seems to help on my muesli, and that's basically fermented milk.
No for the calves, so much as the methane emissions...