#russian cooking

[soupybrainsisuppose]

Yall I made pirogy for the first time today, was yummy :3

[wildatheart2003]

Mackerel

[ilsa-fireswan]

Pesochnoe Pirozhnoe (plum butter cookies) report: YUM! Every single ingredient is rich, so overall the cookie is very decadent.

And, as I was boxing up the cookies to go in the fridge overnight, I remembered that I have a coworker who move here from Ukraine. So I made up a gift bag of cookies for her. She was excited and told me she’d get me some more Russian recipes to play with!

I’ve let several people try them and many think they are very sweet. They are actually less sweet than many American recipes but they are very rich/fatty and I think the types of fat used are bringing forward the sweetness. It’s interesting to me that the foodie folk I passed the cookies to picked up on the many flavors and the non-foodie ones picked up only sweetness.

[thatknittinglady]

I made Palova!

It looks like an egg with chicken pox!

@dasha-aibo

What do you think of my baking?

[plateupaustralia]

Tonight’s Dinner - Chicken Stroganoff with Baby Potatoes.

[ashintheairlikesnow]

This is going to be random but do you have a cookbook you get recipes from when it comes to your cooking adventures? I’m primarily looking for solyanka and some of the other Russian recipes, since I’m going to attempt to do some of them and hoping you could point me in the right direction. Thank you! 😅

Hey hey! So, this is the cookbook I used for the Russian portion of my cooking adventures - technically it combines Russian, some Polish, Ukrainian, and some other Eastern European favorites. It’s smallish but the recipes are very solid, really nice color photography, and a great way to start learning some of the really well-known basics.

Solyanka is such a fundamental soup that everyone’s take is a little different and once you nail the basics, you can really have fun with changing things up! When I made solyanka, I combined a couple of different recipes to hit my favorite ingredients and kind of worked things out from there. Here’s a couple of the recipes I used (I also used one in the book as a reference):

Russian Food In English (this site is so solid! You’ll need to convert measurements in some cases if you are American, but google is right there to help!)

Valentina’s Corner (I went with a MUCH more tomato-heavy soup than she did, but otherwise a good reference!)

This site mostly gave me some good ingredients feedback

Fair warning - track the seasoning as you go! Solyanka is an intensely salty soup, thanks to its plethora of preserved ingredients (smoked/salted meat, olives, capers, etc) and you’ll want to make sure you balance those flavors out. 

My next Russian cookbook (yeah, I’m already eyeing another, look, I have a PROBLEM and my birthday is coming up) is probably going to be Please to the Table, which I have heard is one of the best Russian cookbooks available - but it has no pictures. I usually won’t use a cookbook without photos unless I already have experience with the food.

[tenderatthebone]

an array of russian salads

[lapis-lupus]

Went on a little Food Odyssey tonight

I recently made a friend in Russia. He told me that if he ever leaves his country that the food he'd miss most was something called Ryazhenka (Ряжрнка). Intrigued I looked it up: it's a baked fermented milk product (basically a custard or yogurt), milder in taste than kefir or buttermilk and baked for a latte-like color and caramel notes. More research showed that Lifeway foods, among countless kefir flavors, also made this food-and our local stores carry that brand!

But unforunately...a scouring of every local food store turned up nothing but fruity kefir (not even Lifeway's cool flavors like cappuccino).

So I set out to make my own. Found a recipe, bought milk, buttermilk and a food thermometer, and struggled to find a way to incubate the cultures without actually buying a yogurt maker (we're trying the warmed-slow-cooker-wrapped-in-towels method).

First, in went the milk at 350°F, as the recipe called for.

Through the first hour the temp had to be gradually lowered to 250°F, as a few other recipes had called for. It simmered so hard it was at risk of boiling, and the crust kept rising in a dome that had to be repeatedly deflated. The whole house smelled of warm milk...definitely not one of my favorite odors. Here is one hour in, after deflating:

2 hours in, and it seemed 250°F was the sweet spot. The dome returned but stayed uniform, not constantly growing, and a good simmer could be seen under it. The smell improved too.

3 hours: a nice caramel brown was setting in, and the crust was darker. Somehow the smell got stronger here.

4 hours: now the crust was good and dark, and had a leathery appearance:

After 5 hours it came out; it can be baked up to 8 hours, but by this time it was 2 a.m.. Beneath the crust it was a perfect latte color:

As it was stirred to cool it so as to not kill off the forthcoming cultures, it was a little...chunky? But it hadn't actually curdled, and the bottom of the pan didn't scald. A pinky test didn't taste sour (before culturing) either. I...hope that's right? Running it through a seive improved the texture a lot. A little buttermilk was added, and it was closed in the warm slow cooker (~110°F) and covered in beach towels.

When I wake up we open it up, sieve it again into a jar, and let it cool in the fridge. Then, a taste test!