Today's dishes come from the largest country in the world, and the host of the 2018 World Cup. I originally planned this day to make Russia's dish because it's close to the end of the World Cup, and I didn't want to wait until the weekend of the final since I already had a country scheduled then (France--7/14 is Bastille Day). It was just a coincidence then that I was able to cook Russian food while watching Russia play a quarterfinal game. I don't think anybody planned on that, but congrats to the host nation for making it that far!
I decided on making Russia's version of dumplings called pelmeni and a simple yet filling cabbage soup named shchi. I think the best part of this meal was finally being able to use my pasta roller attachment for my stand mixer. It still took me a few hours to finish everything, but it definitely made quick work of rolling out the dough for the pelmeni.
The dough is actually quite simple to make, consisting of just a few ingredients (egg, salt, oil, flour, and water). It starts out very sticky and wet:
But as you work it and knead it, adding a bit of flour here and there, it becomes nice and soft and easy to work with.
It reminded me of the strukli dough I made for Croatia recently. While the dough rested, I made the filling out of some veggie ground sausage (ground beef would probably be more authentic but pork is also used), onion, and garlic.
For my first batch, I followed the instructions on a recipe using the pasta roller. This required rolling out pieces of the dough into long, thin sheets and cutting out individual circles.
In the end, this took way too long and my circles dried out before I was able to fill and fold them. I also think the dough was rolled too thin; being dry and thin was not conducive to folding. For my second batch I just cut the dough into smaller pieces and rolled each one through to create the circles. This meant each dumpling was a slightly different size/shape, but that was okay.
After being filled, pelmeni are folded over, sealed by pressing the dough together, and then folded like tortellini, like a crescent with the ends then pinched together. My first few tries were disastrous, trying to get the folds and amount of filling right, while also working with a dried out dough.
I was able to get 30 pretty okay-looking ones in my first batch, though.
The ones in the picture at the beginning of this post were made with my second batch, thicker dough that I tried not to let dry out too much before filling. They also had less filling, which meant they were bigger and had more extra dough around the edges.
After folding, they went into salted, boiling water, staying in there for just a few minutes to cook the dough. I believe pelmeni are usually made with raw ingredients on the inside, which are then cooked during this stage, but I decided to cook the onions and garlic before because I'm not a fan of raw onion taste.
Once they were done cooking, I served them with sour cream and a bit of dried dill.
And because spending hours on one dish wasn't enough, I had to make a second one. Luckily shchi is actually very easy to make. It has been a staple food in Russia since the 9th century, so it makes sense that it would be considered one of their national dishes. I actually really love cabbage soup (easy, cheap, filling, and healthy) and I'm excited that this recipe made a huge pot so I have several days of leftovers that I can take for lunch.
The soup starts by cooking onion, grated carrot, and thinly sliced cabbage. Some recipes use celery as well.
Stock or water is added, along with potato, bay leaf, and black pepper. Recipes also use diced tomato, but since my broth was tomato-y enough, I omitted it. It's commonly garnished with smetana, which is a kind of sour cream. I went for sour cream and dried dill as well.
The pelmeni and shchi went perfectly together, and we were lucky enough that the weather has cooled down enough lately to be able to enjoy a bowl of soup without completely melting.
By the way, I also had an extra batch of pelmeni dough with no more sausage filling, so I decided to use some of the extra cabbage along with sliced leek and plenty of black pepper. I plan on eating those with some soy sauce!
до следующего раза! *Google translate says this means "till next time"
Comments