#14 (Part 2): Andorran Calçots amb Salvitxada

So, there are two slight misnomers in the title of this post. The first, as I mentioned in my last entry, is that this is not, strictly speaking, an Andorran food, but rather a food of Catalonia, Spain, which is right next door to Andorra. And it’s not just a food there – it’s an event. Calçotades are communal festivals dedicated to the mass consumption of the dish you’re about to read about. Since Andorran cuisine is described by every source I encountered as being “essentially Catalan cuisine,” I think this dish is fair game even if its origins lie in a neighboring country. (And Spain is big enough and full of enough culinary options that I’m not exactly worried about having used up one Spanish dish in advance.) More importantly to me when I was deciding what to make: even if it weren’t fair game, it sounded delicious. Grilled onions dunked in a savory roasted tomato, pepper, and almond-based sauce – what’s not to like?

The second misnomer is the word “calçots” itself. The calçot is a specific type of green onion, bred and grown in such a way that the white part is 6-10 inches long. They look like this:

Source: Wikipedia

Unfortunately, calçots do not, to the best of my knowledge, exist around here as a thing one can purchase. I might have been able to grow some pseudo-calçots in the garden using the technique described in that Wikipedia article if I’d planned this meal months in advance, but, obviously, I did not do so. So my mini-calçotada featured regular green onions and leeks in place of proper calçots. As the “about” page on this blog says, I never promised to be perfectly authentic, but I hope that what I ended up with is at least reasonably close.

So, shall we grill some onions ‘n’ leeks?

THE PROCESS

I am beginning to think I should rename this blog “197 ways to cook onions and onion relatives.” Or maybe “197 ways to cook onions, unless it’s a tropical country, in which case there are also coconuts.” That might be a little long, though, so I’ll probably just stick with what I’ve got.

Before doing anything with my onions ‘n’ leeks, I needed to make the salvitxada sauce in which they’d be dipped. I began by sticking my dried chili peppers in a bowl of warm water so that they’d become not-so-dry chili peppers. I left them there for about half an hour. While they were soaking, I poured some olive oil onto a cookie sheet, spread it around to coat the bottom, and then put my tomatoes on there. I drizzled a little more olive oil over each of them, and then they went into a 350° F oven to roast for 20 minutes. Soon their skins had split open and they looked nice and roasted.

Looking at these tomatoes, I kinda feel like an honorary member of House Bolton. I think a flayed tomato would make for a much nicer sigil than a flayed man, anyway, don’t you?

I let my flayed tomatoes cool for a few minutes before doing anything else to them. In the meantime, I added some more olive oil to a small frying pan, heated it up over low heat, and then added my slivered almonds. I cooked them (stirring them around often) for a couple of minutes until they were lightly browned. I dumped the contents of that pan (olive oil and all) into my little bullet food processor and let it chop the almonds a bit more, till they were more like a chunky almond paste than individual nut pieces. (The almonds would get chopped up more once they were mixed into the rest of the sauce, but having them be smallish to start seemed helpful.)

Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you feel like a…blobby sticky pile of nuts?

Somewhere around this point, the chilis finished soaking, so I removed them from the water, shook them out over the sink a bit (a fair amount of water ended up inside each chili, so pouring it out before proceeding was necessary to avoid making the kitchen any messier than it inherently gets when I’m cooking), and then sliced each one in half lengthwise, removed the seeds, and chopped the peppers into small pieces.

By now, the tomatoes had gone from 350° to “pretty hot, but not so hot that you’d burn yourself touching them,” so it was time to peel off what remained of their skins. (As the Boltons would say, those tomatoes have no secrets now! Although I’m not sure what kind of secrets a tomato would have in the first place. Embezzled topsoil? An illicit affair with a carrot? The buried evidence of a murdered potato?) I then cut each one open, removed most of the seeds (in theory, I should have removed all of the seeds, but that’s a pain in the butt and it’s not like a few tomato seeds were going to harm anything), and piled up the semi-disintegrated, mostly-non-seedy tomato chunks on a plate.

They’re only a little bit seedy – so I guess that means their secrets are probably just something pretty tame, like hidden folders on their little tomato-computers full of suggestive photos of turnips. Dirty, dirty turnips.

I poured off a little of that liquid you see in the picture, but given that it’s a mixture of olive oil and tomato juice and both of those things are supposed to be in the sauce anyway, I didn’t really try to drain them very much.

Next up: toast! One of my family members expressed surprise at the idea of toast being a significant component of a dipping sauce, but my sources were pretty clear that authentic salvitxada required it. I used the same pan in which I’d toasted my almonds, poured in yet another dollop of olive oil, heated it up to medium-low, and then dropped in my slices of bread (flipping them quickly to make sure each side got a coating of oil – if one side sops it all up and doesn’t leave enough for the other side, just drizzle a little olive oil over it. This is not a recipe in which “too much olive oil” is really a concern). I fried the bread until it was crispy and very lightly browned on each side – or at least that was the plan. In practice, I got called away from the stove briefly while the bread was toasting, and while I was only gone for a very short period, it was apparently juuuuuust long enough to overcook the toast. Hmph. Luckily, I had the whole rest of the loaf to work with, so I just carved off two more thick slices and tried again. The second attempt was much more successful:

Mmm, toasty! (And the overcooked slices were still pretty tasty for snacking on while I cooked, so it all worked out in the end.)

All my salvitxada ingredients were now ready to go! It was time for the full-sized food processor. Into it went the tomatoes, the chopped peppers, and the almonds. I crumbled one slice of toast in there too (I would end up adding roughly 1/2 to 2/3 of the second slice once I got to the testing-the-consistency stage), and then added the garlic, red wine vinegar, salt, pepper, paprika, and mint leaves. It made for a pretty colorful mélange.

It also made for a pretty excellent-smelling melange, which is always a good sign! (Incidentally, it is kind of annoying that WordPress won’t let me use accented letters in captions. I may have forgotten a lot of my French, but I’m not quite enough of a space cadet to forget how to accent a French loanword between one sentence and the next, even if WordPress wants to make you think I am. Hmph!)

I popped the lid back on and let the food processor do its thing. Once everything looked pretty well blended into a cheerful, bright orange sauce, I did some consistency and taste testing. You can obviously add any of the ingredients that you have more of at this stage, but your most likely additions will be toast (if you only put in one slice to begin with) or olive oil (if the sauce seems a bit too thick – although you want it reasonably thick, since runny dipping sauces don’t work so well). Once I was satisfied with my salvitxada, I let it be and proceeded to deal with the onions ‘n’ leeks.

First up: putting charcoal in the grill and getting it nice and hot. I used mesquite charcoal, since that was recommended as an option in several of the recipes I saw, and also because I like mesquite. (Because I’m not the grill-master in the house, I let that family member handle the charcoal-heating. This would turn out to be a slight mistake on my part, as you’ll see in a moment.)

While the grill was heating up, I chopped the squiggly-root ends off my green onions, chopped both ends off the leeks, and then, since my leeks were pretty fat and I wanted them to get cooked through, cut the leeks in half lengthwise as well.

Speaking of dirty, dirty vegetables, it was kind of amazing just how much dirt was lurking inside these leeks. I think I ended up washing them about seventeen times, because every time I thought I’d gotten all the dirt, another layer of leek would slip aside enough to expose some soil that I’d missed. So, PSA: wash the heck out of your leeks. (In fairness to leeks, I’ve cooked with them many times before without finding anywhere near as much dirt in them, so I think it was just a matter of these particular leeks being sold without any significant washing beforehand. But still: wash your leeks, because no one likes a dirty leek, except possibly for seedy tomatoes.)

It was now grilling time! And it was also now finding-out-why-I-probably-should-have-supervised-the-grill-setup time. You see, in proper calçotades, the calçots are meant to be cooked over pretty intense heat. If you do a Google image search for “calçotada,” you will see numerous pictures in which the calçots are actually engulfed in flames. Normally, when grilling, you want the flames to die down first so that you don’t blacken the outside of your food without cooking the inside – but blackening the outside is, in fact, exactly what you’re supposed to do as the first step in grilling calçots. Unfortunately, I wasn’t specific enough when I described this dish to the resident grill-master, and he (quite reasonably) assumed that I wanted the flames to subside and the coals to get down to a more typical grilling heat. He also didn’t fully understand that I was hoping to cook a lot of onions and leeks at once, and therefore only put coals in a relatively small section of the grill. Since at that point, adding more coals and starting over would have been pretty difficult and everyone was hungry, I decided to make the best of it.

So, as I said, you’re actually supposed to blacken the outside of your calçots (or calçot substitutes), and then, once they’re blackened, wrap them up (traditionally in newspaper, but I used aluminum foil), move them to a less-hot part of the grill, and let them steam in their wrappers until the insides are cooked, too. Since there really wasn’t any way to blacken them at the heat level I had (and also the hot section of the grill was only big enough to accommodate roughly six green onions or two leek-halves at a time, and I didn’t want to be there all night), I just grilled each set of onions or leeks till they had fairly dark char marks. Then I’d drop the hot veggies onto a foil sheet, wrap them up, move them to the side, and start grilling the next set. I left each foil packet on the grill for fifteen minutes or so, which seemed to be sufficient.

Those foil packets are getting all up in my grill! Because, see, they’re on the upper part of the grill? Get it? Get it? (Okay, that was terrible even for me, I admit it.)

I’m not going to lie: this was a frustratingly slow process. It was absolutely my own fault for not clearly explaining what I wanted grill-wise (or just setting up the grill myself), but I was getting pretty grumpy by the time I got to the last few green onions, largely because it was well past dinnertime, I’d skipped lunch that day, and I had to keep cooking things rather than eating them. You know those Snickers commercials where people turn into celebrities when they’re hungry? It was like that, except instead of turning into a famous person doing something humorous, I mostly just turned into a grouch who wanted to eat some freaking grilled onions already. Which is a shame, because turning into Betty White or Danny Trejo would have been pretty awesome!

Anyway, I muddled through despite my lack of famous person transformation, and eventually enough of the onions and leeks were done that I could leave the last couple of foil packets to steam without my active supervision and go eat!

Before I get to “THE VERDICT,” though, I have to briefly explain how one eats calçots. The idea is that you peel off the outermost blackened layer (or, in my case, the outermost somewhat charred layer), dunk the remaining onion-y part of your calçot in the salvitxada, and then chow down on hot, smoky, saucy onions. (Also, traditionally, you’re supposed to have them with lots of bread and lots of red wine. I didn’t happen to have any red wine on hand, so I had to skip that part, but I did still have plenty of bread!)

Look how cheerful that cheerful orange sauce is! Heck, I think it’s practically an ecstatic orange sauce. “Hooray! I’m a mixture of delicious things!” that sauce is saying. Well, since it’s a Catalan sauce, it’s probably saying, “Hurra, jo soc una barreja de coses delicioses!” Or at least something resembling that, assuming Google Translate isn’t completely lying to me and spitting out things about hovercrafts and eels.

THE VERDICT

Pretty good!

I have to give this dish a little bit of a mixed review. The truth is, the onions and leeks weren’t as impressive as I would have liked. The lack of blackening heat meant they didn’t really pick up the smoky flavor they’re supposed to have, and the lack of actually being calçots meant that the oniony part of each green onion was small enough that I only got one or two bites out of each of them, and the leeks were kind of a pain, since cutting them in half meant they really wanted to fall apart and cook unevenly (but if I hadn’t cut them in half, they would have taken approximately 47 years to cook through, or at least that’s what it felt like considering how long they took as it was). Both the onions and the leeks were tasty, to be clear – they just weren’t quite as tasty as I would have hoped. That said, they were certainly good enough that they all got gobbled up pretty quickly – and as for the salvitxada? That was freaking delicious. I was very happy that I ended up having a fair amount of it left over after all the onions and leeks had disappeared, because besides being a great dip for onions and leeks, it was also a pretty great dip for crackers, a tasty topping for grilled chicken, and a super yummy spread to put on slices of crusty bread. I’m not sure I can accurately describe the flavor – I mean, it obviously tastes like roasted tomatoes, chili peppers, almonds, olive oil, mint, garlic, paprika, and so forth, but that combination of flavors isn’t really like anything else I’ve eaten before, so I’m not sure what I can compare it to. Mostly it tastes like “yum.” And yum is a good way to taste!

If I made this again, obviously, I’d want to get the grill set up differently so I could try blackening the green onions and leeks more authentically. But honestly, I’m not sure I’d bother making them again – even if they’d been blackened authentically, I feel like green onions and leeks would never quite measure up to actual calçots. I guess I’ll just have to go to Andorra (or Catalonia) and try the real thing! Sooooo…anyone want to pay to fly me to Europe?

As for the salvitxada, I would definitely make it again. I do think I’d tweak it just a little bit, though. The New Mexico chilis I used had a really lovely flavor, but very little heat – no one would call my salvitxada spicy. (Well, okay, a person who buys “extra mild” salsa might, since it’s probably about as spicy as extra mild salsa. Presumably someone out there thinks extra mild salsa is spicy, given that it exists as a thing one can buy. I kinda feel sorry for that person, though, because man, think of all the delicious Thai and Indian food they can’t eat at all. I don’t even want to imagine a life without Thai and Indian food!) When next I make salvitxada, I think I’ll probably put in three or four chilis instead of just two. That still wouldn’t be hot, by any means, but it ought to give it a little extra kick (maybe up to “mild” salsa level), and I think that would make it even tastier!

THE INGREDIENTS

For the “calçots”:

leeks
green onions

For the salvitxada:

8 plum tomatoes
1/3 cup slivered almonds
2 large dried New Mexico chilis
4 1/2 tsp minced garlic
1 1/2 thick slices of Italian bread (or similar bread)
olive oil sufficient for roasting and frying the roasted and fried things (plus more as needed to get the sauce to the right consistency)
1 1/2 tbsp red wine vinegar
1 sprig of fresh mint
generous dash paprika
salt & pepper to taste

A quick note: I recently added a couple of sentences to my “about” page noting that the weekly schedule just isn’t realistic for me right now. While I’m still hopeful that I’ll get back to that schedule eventually, for the time being, rather than cooking and blogging about something from a different country every week, I’ll be cooking and blogging about something from a different country every however-long-it-takes-me-to-cook-and-blog-about-it. I very much hope you’ll keep reading despite the current erratic schedule, because there are definitely many tasty things and many terrible jokes yet to come!

#14 (Part 1): Andorran Truites de Carreroles

I am SO far behind, and I apologize for that. It’s been too hot here to think – let alone cook – lately, and on top of that I’ve had a bunch of random nonsense come up to keep me busy. But I’m back now! I won’t claim that I’m going to catch up right away, because that’ll certainly jinx me, but I’m going to try to catch up as soon as I can.

When I started researching Andorran cuisine (and learning fun facts about Andorra! For example, did you know that it is officially a “co-principality” and one of their two co-princes is the President of France? Or that no one actually knows for sure where the name “Andorra” comes from? Bust those facts out at your next dinner party, and everyone will surely be impressed by your knowledge of countries smaller than Albuquerque, New Mexico and with roughly a seventh of the population!), what I found over and over was “Andorran cuisine is essentially Catalan cuisine,” with very little in the way of specifically Andorran recipes. So I researched Catalan cuisine, came up with something delicious-sounding I wanted to make, made my grocery list, and then went back to my researching to make sure that the dish I’d selected was indeed also eaten in Andorra…and drew a bit of a blank. The odds are good that it absolutely is eaten in Andorra, but I couldn’t prove it, which made me feel like it might be slightly counter to the spirit of this project if I just made it alone.

That said, I didn’t want to give up on that delicious-sounding recipe (which you’ll read about in Part 2), but I did want to make sure I made something that was unambiguously eaten in Andorra, too. So back to the drawing board (a.k.a. the internet) I went for some deeper research.

At that point, what I learned was that, given Andorra’s location up in the heights of the Pyrenees, not a whole lot of things actually grow there. Thus, traditional Andorran food tends towards the simple and towards things you can actually find up in the mountains – like trout, snails, and mushrooms. (One source said, “Andorran people love going on hikes, mostly because they think of them as an excuse to gather mushrooms!” I have no idea how true that is, but I definitely saw more than a few references to mushrooms being an important part of the Andorran diet.) I haven’t cooked any mushrooms for this project yet, nor have I made a food that could really be called a breakfast, so when I discovered truites de carreroles, a fairly simple Andorran mushroom omelette, that seemed like a winner.

So, shall we begin?

THE PROCESS

I actually used six eggs rather than five (more on that below), but other than that, I successfully managed to put all of the ingredients in this picture! It helps when there aren’t very many ingredients. Thanks for keeping it simple, Andorra!

So, before I start, I have to note that this will be a relatively imprecise recipe. You see, I started out thinking I was going to make one big omelette to be shared among three people, but halfway through preparing things, I remembered that all three of those people like their eggs cooked to different consistencies, and so everyone would be happier if I made three individual omelettes instead. Which is fine, except that making three individual omelettes meant that instead of measuring out specific amounts of salt and pepper, I just added them to each individual’s taste, and further meant that by the time I got to the third omelette, it was clear that my original, carefully measured-out bowl of shredded cheese had been overly depleted and I was going to need to shred some non-measured additional amount. So when you get to the end of this blog post and see quantities like “3/4 cup or so,” that’s why. Luckily, this is the sort of thing where precise quantities really don’t matter – add whatever amounts of cheese, salt, and pepper you feel like, and it’ll be fine. (Well, okay, don’t add, like, a half-teaspoon of cheese, 2 cups of salt, and a gallon of pepper. That would not be fine. But I think you could probably figure that one out on your own.)

Anyway, my first step was to shred the aforementioned cheese. I got out my lovely little grater, managed not to slice any fingers open this time, and filled a bowl with finely-shredded cheese. Next, I finely chopped the scallion, and chopped the mushrooms into smallish chunks. (I used just the caps, but you can totally use the stems, too – they’re going to get cooked until they’re nice and soft, anyway.)

Next, it was time to do some sautéing. I melted two tablespoons of butter in a frying pan over medium heat, added a couple of dashes of salt and pepper, and then tossed in the chopped scallion. Once it had had two minutes or so to soften up, in went the mushrooms as well.

I almost always seem to have a “onions of some sort in a frying pan” picture in these blog posts, but at least this time I’m mixing it up by having mushrooms AND onions of some sort in a frying pan. Vive la difference! (As they might say in Andorra – that is, if “they” happened to speak French, as a reasonably-sized minority of Andorrans do. If they speak Catalan instead (that being the official language of Andorra), they might say “Visca la diferencia,” provided Google Translate is not lying to me and telling me how to say “My hovercraft is full of eels” instead.)

I stirred them around for about five minutes, until they were nice and tender, and then added the tarragon and mixed it in well. After that, I removed the pan from the heat and poured its contents into a bowl so my mushroom mixture would be be nice and convenient when it came time to start filling omelettes with it.

Buttery mushrooms: more appetizing than a hovercraft full of eels! (Incidentally, it turns out that “my hovercraft is full of eels” is “el meu aerolliscador esta ple d’anguiles,” in case you ever need to say that to someone in Andorra. Never let it be said that this blog is not educational!)

Next up: the eggs. I cracked each pair of them into a bowl and added another dash of salt and a more generous dash of pepper to each. Then I plopped some butter (again, precise amounts aren’t necessary here – just make sure you have enough to thoroughly butter-ify the bottom and sides of your pan) into a small frying pan, heated that up over medium-high heat until the butter was melted, spread around the pan, and bubbly, and then poured in the first set of eggs.

At this point, I have to confess that I got a little overly ambitious. I’ve made plenty of omelettes in my life, and they always turn out plenty tasty, but they never seem to turn out especially pretty. So before I began making my truites de carreroles, I read and watched half a dozen online tutorials on how to make an attractive-looking omelette. I was repeatedly assured by said tutorials that this was super-duper easy and anyone could do it. My first clue that those people were lying liars who lie should probably have been the tutorial that suggested you should just fold over one third of the omelette, and then when you flip it out of the pan and onto the plate, it will “naturally” fold the other third over to make a perfect, professional-looking omelette. I am almost completely certain that the person behind that tutorial had 73 previous attempts in which they flipped the fillings right out of their omelette, the omelette fell apart, or it just sorta flopped onto the plate in a pile before they managed to get a take where it actually did that “natural” fold properly, because come ON.

Sadly, while I was certain that particular person was being less than honest about the difficulty level of that omelette-flipping trick, I was more gullible when it came to the people whose instructions were a little less showy. So, feeling emboldened, I set out to follow their instructions and make a classy-looking omelette. I was doing okay at first. I managed all the scooting-eggs-in-from-the-edges-and-turning-the-pan-to-pour-uncooked-eggs-over-to-said-edges bits, although the result looked a little lumpier and bumpier than the tutorials’ versions. I added my fillings, went to fold the omelette…and, of course, the eggs helpfully fell apart, melty cheese oozed out of the holes between the scrambled egg pieces, and the overall result looked less than impressive, to say the least. After that abject fancy-looking-omelette failure, I decided that if I wanted to end up with something remotely photogenic, I was going to need to aim a little lower for the next two omelettes. This meant no trying to fold each omelette into thirds, no fancy egg-scooting procedures, but instead just swirling the eggs around as needed to create a mostly-cooked disc of scrambled egg, sprinkling a third of the mushroom mixture and a third of my grated cheese onto half of it (ish), folding the non-topped half (ish) over, cooking it just a little longer to make sure everything was cooked through and the cheese was nice and melty, and serving it up (carefully and without any silly, showy flipping). Because the truth is that, for all that “presentation” is nice, omelettes taste just as good when they fall to pieces as they do when they’re folded in half semi-competently as they do when they’re “naturally” folded into perfect, tidy thirds by lying liars on YouTube.

Since omelette-making is, by its nature, something that has to be done fairly quickly and without pausing to pick up one’s cell phone and take pictures, I don’t have any photos for you of half-made omelettes, just of the most attractive of the three finished products:

It may not be professional-looking, but it is pretty appetizing-looking, which seems like the important thing! Although now I’m imagining a “professional-looking omelette” in the sense of an omelette that looks like a professional – like, maybe it’s wearing a little suit and tie? Maybe it has little meetings with other breakfast foods? “What’s on the agenda for today, Mr. Omelette?” “We need to monetize our paradigms holistically, Ms. Waffle!” (I have no idea how business-type-people talk, but that seems about right.)

THE VERDICT

Om nom nom nom nom.

I was actually surprised by just how much I liked this! While I like both mushrooms and Gruyère, neither are particular favorites of mine or things I usually put in omelettes, and so I was anticipating that my feelings about truites de carreroles would be something along the lines of “pretty good, but I’d like it better with a different cheese and maybe some other veggies or meat inside it.” But the truth is, a good Gruyère is exactly the right cheese for this omelette, and I think additional ingredients would just distract from the tastiness of this combination. Sometimes simplicity really is best, and this is one of those times.

If I were to make this again – and I don’t see why I wouldn’t, since I make omelettes for breakfast reasonably often (and omelettes for lunch or dinner now and then, too), and this is an excellent omelette – I would either change nothing at all or, possibly, throw in an extra scallion. I do like me some onions (as anyone who’s read this blog knows), and I don’t think one more scallion would drastically change the flavor profile here.

THE INGREDIENTS

(for three 2-egg omelettes)

6 eggs
2 tbsp unsalted butter (plus another 2-3 tbsp or so for buttering omelette pans)
1 1/2 cups diced baby portabellas (or other mushrooms of your choice)
3/4 cups or so finely grated Gruyère cheese
1 scallion, diced
1 tsp tarragon
salt to taste
pepper to taste

#11: Maltese Qaqocc Mimli and Hobz Biz-Zejt

Yup, I made two things again. Luckily, neither recipe involves a lot of steps, so I should be able to fit them both in one post.

Before I get to discussing my Maltese dishes, I want to apologize for my increasingly erratic and slow blogging schedule. If you’ve read the “about me” page (or know me in real life), you’ll know that I have some significant health problems, including chronic illness. Most of the time I manage pretty well, all things considered, but in the last few weeks, on top of my fun bout of stomach flu and assorted stressful goings-on in my life, I’ve been dealing with some pretty unpleasant illness-related complications. I should be okay in the long run, but in the meantime, I have to spend most of my time lying down. This makes cooking and blogging a whole lot harder, seeing as I have not yet installed a bed in my kitchen or developed telekinesis. (Which is really unfair – I mean, in comic books, if somebody is disabled or sick, they always have some super-cool power that pretty much makes up for being blind or not being able to walk or whatever. I think it is perfectly reasonable of me to feel that if I have to be sick, I should at least be able to sauté onions with my brain.) So things may be a bit slow around here for the foreseeable future, but I’ll still be plugging away at this project, and hopefully I’ll be able to get back to my weekly schedule soon.

Anyway, on to Malta! Unsurprisingly, given its location, Malta’s food seems to be significantly influenced by Italian food, but it’s definitely got its own distinct personality. One aspect of that personality that became clear as I sorted through Maltese recipes is that the Maltese appear to be big fans of stuffing things with other things; I quickly found recipes for stuffed zucchini, stuffed eggplant, stuffed peppers, and stuffed squid, but the one that rang my mental “jackpot” bell when I read about it was qaqocc mimli: stuffed artichokes. I love artichokes, and the idea of stuffing them full of tasty things sounded pretty darn amazing.

That probably ought to have been enough for me, but I’d already read many references to hobz biz-zejt (literally, “bread with oil”), which some sources called the national food of Malta. (The other major contender for “national food of Malta” is stewed rabbit, and while I will go to a fair amount of effort for this project, buying a rifle, learning to shoot it, and going after the local bunny population is pretty far over the “fair amount of effort” line. It’s possible that I’ll make a rabbit dish somewhere down the line if I happen to discover a place to buy rabbit meat, but today is not that day.) As it happens, several of the same ingredients are used for both qaqocc mimli and hobz biz-zejt, none of the additional ones were particularly expensive or difficult to acquire, and hobz biz-zejt takes mere minutes to prepare. And it definitely sounded tasty, so I decided that I’d make hobz biz-zejt while the artichokes were cooking and thus try two Maltese foods without significantly adding to my workload.

So, shall we start with some artichokes?

THE PROCESS

Look at all those yummy green things! (Also some yummy sort of beige-ish things and dark brown things and black things and white things and yellowish things and…uh…anchovy-colored things!)

I began by rinsing my artichokes and then sticking ’em in a couple of large pans filled with salted water to soak for half an hour or so. (According to the recipes I read, this makes them slightly easier to “open” in order to stuff them later on.) While the artichokes were soaking, I started making the stuffing.

The first step in the stuffing-making process was to take my sourdough loaf and tear it to bits over a large mixing bowl. (I found it fastest to slice it up and then tear the slices to bits, but use whatever loaf-destroying method you prefer!) Next up, I roughly chopped my parsley and mixed it in with the crumbled bread. Then I chopped the capers, Kalamata olives, and anchovies pretty finely, and added them to the mix along with the minced garlic. (If you’re leery of anchovies, I will note that, used sparingly, they just add a bit of salty, smoky, tangy flavor. You do want to make sure they’re chopped very finely, though, because any remotely big piece of anchovy will definitely overwhelm other flavors. If you’d still rather skip them and have vegetarian qaqocc mimli instead, you might want to add a few extra olives and capers to make up the difference flavor-wise.)

Fun fact: I vastly underestimated how much stuffing one could fit in an artichoke, so if you’re thinking “that doesn’t look like a whole loaf of sourdough bread in that bowl!” you are entirely correct. I actually made the stuffing twice, because the first version, which you see here, only stuffed two of my four artichokes. Artichokes are apparently very hungry vegetables, because they’ll go through a lot of bread before they feel stuffed!

Somewhere in the middle of all that chopping and mixing, I also went back and fished my artichokes out of their baths and shook them off over the sink, so that they would have a little time to dry off before the stuffing was finished.

Once all those ingredients were mixed together, I sprinkled on the salt and pepper, added the olive oil and a quick dash of lemon juice, and kneaded the oil in a bit with that big spoon (and, when I got bored with that slower method, my fingers) until the stuffing felt slightly moistened and stuck together enough to be, well, stuffable.

It was now time to decapitate (and, uh…de-stem-itate?) some artichokes. First, I whacked them against the side of the kitchen table a few times to loosen things up a bit, and then I cut them horizontally just above the top of the stem, taking off the lowest leaves in the process. The goal here is to get them to have a nice flat bottom so that they can stand upright. (Lucky artichokes – I wish I could stuff myself full of sourdough bread while still maintaining a nice flat bottom, or at least one flat enough that I could fit into my old favorite pair of jeans again. But given the choice between a flatter bottom and cooking and eating tasty things, I’m probably going to stick with the second plan, because despite what dumb slogans might have one believe, quite a lot of things taste as good as skinny feels. Including almost everything I’ve made for this project so far, in my not-so-humble opinion! Anyway, back to the artichokes.) Next, I sliced off the tops of the artichokes, so as to lose most of those evil little spines so I wouldn’t get stabbed while stuffing the things. They now looked a little like oversized green roses:

Roses are red, artichokes are green, sugar is sweet, and so is…um…spleen? (Paging Dr. Lecter…)

Next step: actually stuffing the artichokes. I found it easiest to work from the outside in, while making sure each and every leaf had a portion of stuffing on it. For the harder-to-open leaves in the middle of the artichoke, what seemed to work best was to wedge one finger in there to open things up, ready a spoonful of stuffing, and then push it in right after pulling my finger out. Since wedging stuffing into all those crevices forces the leaves apart, by the time you’re done, the artichokes should look even more like flowers, assuming the flowers you’re used to are typically stuffed with breadcrumbs and parsley and so forth. If not, then they probably look slightly less like flowers, but they’re shaped even more like flowers.

See? Pretty floral, right? (And yes, I AM too lazy to clean the artichoke stems and crumbs and parsley leaves off the table before taking pictures. I am a firm believer in cleaning my table precisely once per cooking session, no matter how many photos I want to take before then.)

Once all four artichokes were well and truly stuffed, I got out my largest cooking pot…at which point it was quickly apparent that my largest pot was not going to be nearly large enough to hold all the artichokes in their stuffed state. Luckily, a family member remembered the existence of a pot so ginormously huge that we keep it in storage rather than in the kitchen cabinets, in case we ever want to cook a whole turkey or something in it. It was fetched, the artichokes fit inside beautifully (just close enough together to help keep each other upright, but not so close together that they’re being squished), and that problem was solved. (If you don’t have a ginormously huge pot, you have two good options. First, you could just put them into multiple pots. For all that it’s good to have them all together to keep each other upright and ensure they’re all cooked fairly evenly, I don’t honestly think they would have fallen over without each other’s support, and this is a pretty forgiving recipe when it comes to cooking times, anyway. Second, you could halve (or quarter!) this recipe. I think these artichokes are best served as a shared appetizer, in which case one of them will feed a few people, so unless you’re having a huge dinner party or want to eat them as an entree instead, you probably won’t actually need to make four at a time.)

Once they were all in the ginormously huge pot, I carefully poured water in around them to a depth of about two inches.

I lost a few breadcrumbs and pieces of parsley in the process, but I’m pretty sure there was still enough of both inside the artichokes. I mean, it’s possible that you’re looking at this picture and thinking, “Gosh, those artichokes look far too empty,” but if so, I think you’re setting some pretty unrealistic standards for me, and only my mother is allowed to do that. (No, I’m still not going to completely overhaul my life and go to medical school, Mom! I don’t even like medicine! I still kinda freak out at the sight of blood! LET ME LIVE, WOMAN.)

I slowly brought that water up to a boil, and then put the lid on my pot, turned the heat down, and let it gently simmer for about 50-55 minutes. Like I said, the cooking time here is fairly forgiving, as long as you keep the heat low and don’t let the water boil away. Once it got to about 40 minutes, I started periodically testing the artichokes for doneness by gently tugging on a leaf. Once the leaf came away easily in my hand, I knew they were ready. I carefully scooped them out of the pan with a large slotted spoon, put one of them on a plate, and added the finishing touches – a generous drizzle of olive oil and a lighter sprinkle of lemon juice. Then it was ready to eat!

I’m all (arti)choked up with pride at how cool these ended up looking!

THE VERDICT

Tasty! And super attractive, which is nice, too.

Eating one of these is almost like having your artichokes with a dip, except each leaf has been pre-loaded with dip for your convenience. The tenderest leaves, near the center, were the tastiest, since they did the best job of absorbing flavors from the stuffing, but all of it was pretty good!

If I make these again (which is likely if ever I’m hosting a dinner party and want to get some oohs and ahhs, because seriously, these look spectacular in person as an appetizer offering), the main change I’d like to make is upping the quantity of olives and capers, and maybe adding some more lemon juice to the stuffing from the start, because I think they could have used just a little more intense flavor in the stuffing. Other than that, they were pretty excellent.

THE INGREDIENTS

4 large globe artichokes
1 loaf of sourdough bread
1 bunch fresh parsley
3 tsp garlic, minced
15-20 Kalamata olives, diced
3 tbsp capers, diced
6 anchovy fillets, diced
5 tbsp olive oil (plus more for drizzling)
dash lemon juice (plus more for drizzling)
dash salt
dash pepper

On to the hobz biz-zejt!

While the name is “bread with oil,” it’d probably be better described as “bread with a bunch of tasty stuff on it, i.e. an open-faced sandwich.”

As I mentioned above, this recipe shares several ingredients with the qaqocc mimli:

It does add roughly 300% more tomato products, though. (Yes, I know percentages don’t work that way and 400% of 0 tomatoes would be 0 tomatoes, but “this adds three tomato products” didn’t sound as catchy, okay?)

(As I also mentioned above, I significantly underestimated how much bread I would need in order to fill four artichokes – which meant that it was lucky that I like sourdough bread enough that I’d gone ahead and bought two loaves just to be safe.)

So, about those three tomato products. One thing that came up over and over when reading about Maltese food was “kunserva,” a Maltese tomato concentrate that is essentially the national condiment. Many articles and blog posts I read stressed that everyone in Malta eats kunserva, everyone has a kunserva recipe, everyone pines for their grandmother’s homemade kunserva, and so on and so forth. While there do exist companies canning Maltese kunserva and selling it outside of Malta, I couldn’t find anywhere near me that sold such a thing. Since I wasn’t up for an elaborate, time-consuming process of concentrating and sun-drying my own tomatoes, I was going to have to improvise a little. And so I hunted for descriptions of what kunserva actually tastes like, and what I gathered was that it is a little like our tomato paste, but tangier and sweeter. I also saw a few recipes for hobz biz-zejt that suggested that, if one did not have kunserva, one could make acceptable hobz biz-zejt by slicing a fresh tomato and rubbing the cut side on the piece of bread. I decided that, since I like tomatoes a whole lot, I would both try to approximate kunserva and do some tomato-rubbing for good measure.

So, making imitation kunserva was the first step. I diced several sun-dried tomatoes, and mixed them into the tomato paste along with a pinch of sugar and a dash of salt. I put that aside while I cut two thick slices of bread. (Actually, I put it aside while I made the artichokes, because I figured giving it a while to sit and absorb flavor from the sun-dried tomatoes would only make it tastier, so I made my faux-kunserva before anything else. I don’t know that the extra couple of hours made a huge difference, but it didn’t seem to hurt any.) If you can’t find plain, bagged sun-dried tomatoes rather than the ones that are canned in olive oil, the canned ones would work just fine, too (maybe even better, since those often tend to be pre-diced), especially since the next step was to pour olive oil onto a shallow plate, and then dunk one side of each slice of bread in it, gently squeezing out the excess in any bits of the bread that got over-oiled. (One can also make hobz biz-zejt with toasted sourdough bread, in which case you presumably wouldn’t have to do the squeezing bit.) Once I had a nice, even coating of olive oil on one side of each slice of bread, I put my slices olive oil side up on a plate, cut my tomato in half, and started rubbing one half on the bread.

At this point, I realized that the whole tomato-rubbing thing would probably have worked better with pre-sliced bread (or toasted bread), because the slightly uneven surface of soft sourdough bread that I’d cut myself with a rather dull bread knife was less inclined to absorb tomato juice from the rubbing than to fall apart from it. So while the descriptions I’d read of the tomato-rubbing option told me to rub until the bread turned pink, I actually just rubbed until the bread turned a slightly pinkish-tinged version of olive oil green. Oh, well. I had my jury-rigged kunserva, and so the tomato-rubbing was mostly a backup plan, anyway. Accordingly, I spread a layer of faux-kunserva over the bread.

The sun-dried tomato chunks kinda make it look less attractive and more clumpy, but (a) they’re worth it, and (b) they’re about to get very thoroughly covered up, anyway.

At this point, I had actually reached the end of the list of defining elements that make this hobz biz-zejt as opposed to some other kind of open-faced sandwich. That doesn’t mean you’re supposed to stop here when making hobz biz-zejt, though! Instead, it means that at this point, you’re meant to pile on more toppings out of a long list of options, some of which are more common than others. Since I was aiming for as much authenticity as possible, I went with ingredients that almost every recipe for hobz biz-zejt I saw suggested as popular choices. So, in order, I layered my hobz biz-zejt with canned tuna, sliced pickled onions, sliced Kalamata olives, capers (chopped into halves, because I had some fairly large capers, as capers go), torn parsley leaves, and a dash of salt and pepper. The end result might not have been quite so spectacular-looking as the qaqocc mimli, but it was still pretty attractive!

Maltese food wins all the food beauty pageants. True story.

THE VERDICT

Delicious!

While this is, as I said, pretty much just a fancy-looking open-faced sandwich, it’s a really tasty fancy-looking open-faced sandwich.  I don’t know if my faux-kunserva accurately approximated the taste of real kunserva, but I do know it made for a darn tasty sandwich spread, especially combined with the olive oil, and all the other ingredients played very well together. I actually ended up making hobz biz-zejt for my lunch the next day, and the day after that as well, since I had leftover faux-kunserva and this was an eminently craveable quick meal. Honestly, I think I may have liked this even better than the qaqocc mimli, although they’re different enough both in flavor profile (despite the overlapping ingredients) and in the situations in which one would most likely serve/eat them (i.e. fancy dinner party appetizer vs. quick lunch) that it’s hard to make a direct comparison. I think it’s the improved ratio of deliciousness to time and effort required that nudges hobz biz-zejt into a slight lead for me.

When (not if) I make this again, I’ll change nothing at all, unless I happen to be out of one of the ingredients or something. This was great, and I have no doubt it’s going to be a frequent quick, tasty lunch for the rest of my life.

THE INGREDIENTS

For the “kunserva”:

1 can tomato paste
handful of sundried tomatoes, diced
generous pinch sugar
dash salt

For the rest of the sandwich:

sourdough bread, cut in thick slices
tomato
canned albacore tuna
pickled/cocktail onions, chopped
Kalamata olives, chopped
capers, chopped
fresh parsley
salt & pepper to taste

#8: Norwegian Kanelboller

I’ve had a stressful couple of weeks, which means a few things: (1) I was sensible enough to constrain myself to one dish this time instead of two or three or four, (2) it took me the full week to find time to make my one dish, and I was still awfully busy for some time afterward, so this post is going up more than a week after the last one (sorry!), and (3) this week’s recipe is not really as “new and different” as I ideally aim for these recipes to be.

Kanelboller, you see, is Norwegian for “cinnamon buns.” I have, obviously, both made and eaten cinnamon buns/cinnamon rolls before, but after a long and stressful week, I was craving comfort food, and, well, it’s hard to beat cinnamon rolls when it comes to comfort food. These ones have a little twist (both literally and figuratively!) that makes them uniquely Nordic, so they still do qualify under my rules. (Also, there’s a non-zero chance that we’ll revisit Norway with a bonus recipe in about a month. You’ll see why when and if that happens!)

Boller – i.e. “buns” – are apparently a staple of Norwegian cuisine. Boller are lightly sweet rolls seasoned with cardamom, and there are plain boller, boller with raisins or other dried fruit in them, boller with chocolate in them, and, of course, boller with cinnamon filling. I seriously considered making each of those varieties, but, as I said, at the end of a stressful week, kanelboller were the ones that sounded most like comfort food, and so kanelboller it would be.

Being swamped and stressed also meant one more thing: I didn’t have a lot of mental energy left for going through a bunch of recipes and fiddling with everything until I had a recipe of my own. Instead, I stuck pretty closely to the recipe on this Norwegian food blog (which has a bunch of excellent sounding recipes, including some for other kinds of boller). I did tweak a few quantities and steps, so my kanelboller aren’t exactly like hers, but they’re pretty similar.

Okay – let’s get things rolling. (Get it, ’cause they’re rolls? Man, I’m so witty.)

THE PROCESS

There aren’t too many ingredients this week, and no particularly unusual or hard-to-find ingredients at all.

In theory, I want to eat healthier. You can probably tell how good I am at meeting that goal by the three sticks of butter in this picture. It’s not my fault that butter keeps being delicious at me!

I began by slightly warming half a cup of the milk in the microwave (you don’t want it more than a teensy smidge above room temperature), mixing in a teaspoon of sugar, and activating the yeast in it. The recipe this is largely based on does not suggest activating the yeast before adding it to the mix, and you can skip this step if you want, but I strongly prefer to do it. Every so often you get a dud packet of yeast, and it’s nice to find that out before you mix it into your dough. I mention this because I did, in fact, get a dud packet of yeast this time around – it sat there in the sugary milk and did nothing at all. Luckily, I had a few more packets of yeast in the pantry, and so the second bowl of milk, sugar, and yeast foamed up just fine. While it was getting nice and foamy, I put the flour, sugar, salt, and cardamom in a large mixing bowl, and heated the other two cups of milk to room temperature. After the yeast had had ten minutes to foam up, it went into the mixing bowl as well, along with one egg. I mixed those in and then gradually added the other two cups of milk. Then in went the softened butter, also added gradually. (If you have a good, large stand mixer or something similar, all this mixing would probably be much easier to do that way. I only have a medium-sized, mediocre food processor, and so I did my mixing by hand – and I mean that literally, since after a certain point it’s much it’s much easier to grab the dough and massage butter into it than to try to use a spoon.) Once everything was well-mixed, I formed the dough into a big ball, covered the mixing bowl, and left it to rise for about an hour.

While it was rising, I made my cinnamon filling by mixing together butter, cinnamon, sugar, and salt. (The butter I used was unsalted butter – if you’re using a stick of salted butter here, you should skip adding the additional salt.) I tasted a little of it to see how I liked it. (Okay, I’ll be honest, I tasted a lot, at many points in this process. There’s no real way to make these kanelboller without frequently getting cinnamon-sugar-butter on your hands, and if you can do that without licking your fingers every couple of minutes, you are a stronger person than I am. I had to wash my hands about seventy-three times while I was making these rolls because there kept being more delicious cinnamon filling to lick off them.) After that first taste test, I decided I wanted the filling to have a little more Scandinavian oomph to it, and added some cardamom to it, too.

Just try to tell me you wouldn’t be licking this off your fingers constantly, too. It’s like pure, concentrated unhealthiness. And it’s AWESOME.

Filling done, I used up a good-sized chunk of my remaining stick of butter thoroughly greasing several cookie sheets, and then it was time to check on the dough, which had risen nicely to create a giant monster doughball of dooooooooooooooooooom!

DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

…okay, not so much doom as tastiness. Which is not actually very much like doom. But still! It’s big!

This is probably a good moment to mention that this recipe makes a lot of kanelboller. I believe I ended up with 25 full-sized rolls – and that was after everyone in the house (including me, of course) stole multiple blobs of dough, because lightly sweet, cardamom-flavored dough is super yummy. Since everyone in the house (again, including me) has a major sweet tooth, I wasn’t worried about rolls going to waste (and indeed, they did not), but if you don’t have a lot of people to feed or your household isn’t full of people who will happily eat three cinnamon rolls a day, you might want to halve the recipe.

Anyway, I took my giant monster doughball of doom and/or tastiness and kneaded it for five minutes or so. I then divided it in half, chucked one half back in the bowl, and put the other half on a lightly floured silicone baking mat to roll it out. (I used to use waxed paper for this, but I hate rolling out relatively tough dough like this on waxed paper – it’s always grabbing the paper and crinkling it up instead of rolling out properly. Silicone mats are much nicer, if you’ve got one.) Because this is a relatively tough dough, it took some work to get it to spread out nicely, but eventually the dough got to roughly a quarter-inch in thickness, and I had a rectangle large enough to more than cover the baking mat.

Okay, it’s not exactly a rectangle, but this is baking, not geometry. Although both of those things do involve pi!

I then took my cinnamon-butter mixture and spread half of it over one half of my big dough rectangle, like so:

It’s sort of like a black and white cookie, only much bigger and also not actually black, white, or a cookie.

I carefully folded the dough in half, so that I had a long, comparatively thin rectangle of dough with a thick layer of cinnamon filling inside. I stretched and squished the dough until all the edges all lined up fairly well. I then took a knife and sliced the dough rectangle in half crosswise (so that now I had two shorter, squarer rectangles of dough), and then began slicing each of those rectangles into strips lengthwise.

That description seems like something that probably needs an illustration, so here, have an illustration. I am nothing if not helpful.

Each strip was about 3/4 of an inch wide. As you can see (thanks to my helpfulness), each one consists of two layers of dough with cinnamon filling in between them.

Now it was time to make the kanelboller look all pretty. After I sliced each strip, I twisted it into a spiral, like so:

It’s like a magical unicorn horn of cinnamon-y goodness!

Then I tied each spiral into a simple knot and tucked the ends in. This may sound slightly complicated, but it’s really knot. (Ba-dum tshhh!) The recipe I linked to earlier in this post includes a YouTube video demonstration, which might be helpful. It’s not at all necessary to do this whole twisting and knotting thing if you’d rather just make a simpler shape, but the twisting and knotting is really very easy and the resulting buns look…well, see for yourself!

See? They’re all pretty and swirly and stuff!

I let each tray of kanelboller rise a little more for about fifteen minutes (they didn’t rise very much more, though, so honestly, you could probably skip this if you’re in a hurry), made a simple egg wash by mixing together one egg and two teaspoons of milk, and then brushed a little of that over each roll so that they looked nice and shiny.

Oooooh, shiny.

Then they went into the oven at 390° F to bake for about 13-14 minutes. While the first cookie sheets of cinnamon rolls were baking, I went back and got the other half of my doughball (of doooooooooooom) and repeated the whole process of rolling, coating, folding, slicing, twisting, knotting, and egg-washing with it. Then I baked those rolls, too, until finally, I had kanelboller…

Om nom nom.

…lots and lots of kanelboller.

Om nom nom NOM. (Also, I should note that this picture was taken after about five of them had already been eaten. I was not kidding when I said that this recipe makes a lot of rolls!)

THE VERDICT

I mean, they’re made-from-scratch cinnamon rolls – what do you think the verdict is?

But seriously, these are delicious. The cardamom does give them a slightly more complex (and yummy!) flavor than plain cinnamon rolls, and while I’m obviously a bit biased, I think they look gorgeous, too. (Also, because I was rather proud of this: one of my family members brought some kanelboller to work to distribute among their coworkers, and apparently one of the reviews they received was “if delicious is 10, this is a 20.” So, yeah…they’re pretty tasty!) As I said at the beginning, they are obviously not quite as new and different as I ideally aim for with this project, but as comfort food, they were utterly successful. And hey, I didn’t injure myself in any stupid ways this week, so that endears me to the kanelboller in and of itself.

If I make these again – which I probably will, because they’re really not that complicated and they end up tasting and looking pretty darn impressive – I honestly don’t think I’d change much of anything. Perhaps I’d make even more filling so that the cinnamon-sugar swirls were bigger and the rolls were even less healthy, but that’s about it.

THE INGREDIENTS

For the dough:

8 cups flour
2/3 cup sugar
4 tsp cardamom
1 tsp salt
1 package yeast
2 1/2 cups milk
2/3 cup butter, softened (11 1/3 tbsp, or just under 1 1/2 sticks), plus more to grease the cookie sheets

For the filling:

1 stick (1/2 cup) butter, softened
1/2 cup sugar
4 1/2 tbsp cinnamon
1 tsp cardamom

For the egg wash:

1 egg
2 tsp milk

Because I took something in the vicinity of eleventy billion years actually getting this post up, the next country will be revealed roughly one minute after I hit “publish” on this. Stay tuned!

#5: Moldovan Plăcintăs, Two Ways

I’ve been pretty pleased with the way the random selection of countries has gone thus far. Sooner or later, I’m bound to draw neighboring countries back-to-back or stay on the same continent for a month, but starting off with five weeks in five completely different regions of the world has made this project especially fun. So, having gone from Western Africa to the Middle East to Central America to East Asia, this week, we’re in Eastern Europe. And having stuck with mostly entrees and savory foods thus far, it’s time to get a little bit snacky and a little bit sweet.

Incidentally, besides introducing me to tasty new foods, this project has already helped improve my knowledge of geography, too. I was less than completely sure of Honduras’s location before looking it up a couple of weeks ago (I knew it was one of the countries in the middle of Central America, but I couldn’t have told you with any certainty which outline on the map belonged to Honduras and which one belonged to Nicaragua), but now I know both where it is and at least a little bit of its culture and history. I was even less certain of Moldova’s location when I drew it this week – in fact, I’d say the sum total of my knowledge of Moldova a week ago consisted of “it’s somewhere in Eastern Europe, and I think it’s had problems of some sort that have made the news in recent years? Also, it may or may not be the same thing as Moldavia?” (Turns out it’s not exactly the same thing as Moldavia, which was a principality in the same general region (and named after the same river) that ceased to exist roughly 150 years ago, but a lot of people still seem to use “Moldavian” to mean “Moldovan,” which explains my confusion.) But hey, now I know where Moldova is (it’s in between Romania and Ukraine) and why they’ve been in the news (a rather depressing assortment of problems, most notably including the fact that the local banks “lost” a billion dollars in 2014, where “lost” means “oops, it seems to have fallen directly into the pockets of one or more very wealthy, very powerful, very terrible people”). And more importantly – at least for the purposes of this project – I now know how to make plăcintăs.

(A side note: I actually made two things again this week, but the first one (mamaliga, or Moldovan polenta, which I tried preparing baked with cheeses and herbs) turned out neither interestingly good nor interestingly bad, but just blandly mediocre. I think my main mistake was trying to make a reduced-sodium version of it; there are lots of yummy dishes in the world with minimal salt content, but this didn’t happen to be one of them. On top of the fact that the resulting dish was less than interesting, my cell phone freaked out that day and consistently refused to take pictures in focus, so all I would have had for you is instructions on how to make tolerably okay-ish food accompanied by pictures of blurry yellow blobs. Under the circumstances, I’m going to skip that and cut straight to the plăcintăs.)

Plăcintăs, or plăcintă cakes, are an old, old recipe – or at least a modernized version of an old, old recipe. The name derives from the Latin word “placenta,” which referred to a type of cake long before it ever referred to an organ, and the pastry itself derives from the placenta cakes eaten in the Roman empire a couple of millennia ago. They’re commonly eaten in both Moldova and Romania, and they come in all sorts of varieties, both sweet and savory. I was feeling indecisive as to whether to go for savory plăcintăs or sweet ones, and then I remembered the wise words of that taco commercial girl from a couple of weeks ago:

I have a feeling I’m going to get a lot of use out of this meme.

I decided that I would get my dough mostly made, divide it in half, add the ingredients that needed to be different in savory vs. sweet plăcintăs, and then make a half-batch of plăcintă cu mere (apple cakes) and a half batch of plăcintă cu brânză (cheese cakes, not to be confused with cheesecakes).

I’ve mentioned before that I’m not able to achieve perfect authenticity with all these recipes (nor am I trying to), and I departed a little bit from the perfectly authentic Moldovan recipes I found in both cases. When it came to the plăcintă cu brânză, the departure was both minor and necessary – the sort of cheese normally used for them in Moldova is also called “brânză” (which, somewhat unhelpfully, is just the Romanian word for “cheese,” although I think in this case it is probably the same thing as bryndza, a sheep milk cheese that Wikipedia tells me comes from Moldova and thereabouts). There wasn’t much chance of me finding Moldovan sheep milk cheese around here, but luckily, virtually every recipe I read noted that it tastes a lot like feta, so that was an easy substitution. As for the plăcintă cu mere, the departure was still fairly minor, but technically entirely unnecessary. You see, every recipe I found suggested that the apple filling should consist solely of apples, cinnamon, and ordinary white sugar. Which is nice and all, but I’m willing to eschew total authenticity in favor of adding some cloves, nutmeg, and brown sugar in there, too, because I love cloves, nutmeg, and brown sugar on apples. Mmm…cloves…

You can’t spell LOVE without CLOVES! Wait…I think I got that backwards. Anyway, the point is that cloves are awesome and I’m going to put them on my apples, SO THERE.

(Image source: Buzzle)

Okay, that’s enough nattering on about delicious cloves and toga-wearing placenta munchers. Let’s talk about…

THE PROCESS

As usual, I started by photographing my ingredients.

Cheese pastry ingredients on the left, apple pastry ingredients on the right, both-kinds-of-pastry ingredients in the middle, and person who now kind of wants to start a punk band called “Toga-Wearing Placenta Munchers” behind the camera.

Next up was activating my yeast. A couple of the recipes I was working from called for buttermilk as the main liquid in my plăcintăs, but buttermilk isn’t the best liquid in which to activate yeast thanks to its added acidity, so I put the yeast in a little milk instead (with a teaspoon of sugar to make the yeast extra happy). Once the yeast was sufficiently activated, I stirred it in with the flour, salt, buttermilk, and egg in a large mixing bowl. At this point, I’d been hoping to go ahead and divide the dough so that I could use olive oil in the cheese plăcintă dough and plain vegetable oil in the apple plăcintă dough, but it wasn’t quite moist enough to pick up all the flour. So I decided to split the difference, and added one tablespoon of each, which made my main dough-ball just wet enough to be able to be divided properly. Once I’d split it in half, I added another tablespoon of the “correct” oil to each of the new, smaller dough-balls, and then added sugar (and a little more flour, to balance out the sugar’s stickiness – you just need enough to make sure the dough can be rolled into a smooth ball without sticking to your hands) to the dough for the apple plăcintăs. I then kneaded both blobs of dough for a bit, covered them up, and let them rise for 45 minutes or so. Then after a quick additional session of punching-down and kneading, I covered them back up and gave them another 45 minutes while I prepared my fillings.

Unfortunately, I sort of forgot that I was trying to write recipes here, and I didn’t do a particularly precise job of measuring how much of everything I put in the two fillings, but instead pretty much added things to taste. I’ll offer approximations and guesses as to the amounts in the ingredient lists at the end of this post, but if you try this recipe at home, I recommend taste-testing your own fillings and making them with whatever proportions strike your fancy.

First up was the apple filling. I peeled, cored, and chopped three nice tart Granny Smith apples and then tossed them in a saucepan on the stove with white and brown sugar (I probably would have used just the brown, but my “light” brown sugar seemed to be mislabeled, because once I opened the bag it became clear that it was noticeably darker and had a much stronger molasses flavor than typical light brown sugar), cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves, and let that cook just long enough to soften the apples up a little.

*sings* Tasty spices went in the mix/ Of this apple stuff I did fix/ And then I took some pics/ Oh, woooooouldn’t it be CLOVErly!

While that was cooking, I made my cheese mixture – mostly crumbled feta, but with a generous handful of shredded mozzarella (so I’d get good gooey meltiness inside my plăcintăs), along with the last of the good parsley left over from Week 2 and a spoonful of dried dill weed.

It’s dill-icious! (I should note that this pun has been shamelessly stolen from a friend who has his own, much fancier cooking blog with some super-spiffy, super-geeky recipes.)

Once the fillings were done and the two balls of dough had roughly doubled in size, I divided each dough-ball into four roughly equal chunks, balled them up, and rolled them out into flat circles (okay, vaguely circle-ish shapes) around 6-8 inches in diameter. Each one then got a generous scoop of its appropriate filling in its center, like so:

The ones with apple filling look just like this, only with apple filling. Amazing, I know.

Then it was time for some Moldovan pastry origami. I folded down the top, bottom, and sides, then slightly folded in the corners.

You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em…

Then I used my fingers and the rolling pin (not at the same time, because that would hurt) to press those edges together as well as possible and flatten the whole thing out even more.

…know when to walk away, and know when to SMASH THEM WITH A ROLLING PIN.

(Note: do not try smooshing the apple ones with the rolling pin unless you like apple explosions shooting out of your plăcintăs, since cooked apples contain a lot more moisture than uncooked cheese. Just smoosh them as well as you can by hand, and patch up any inadvertent applesplosion holes with spare bits of dough and a little cold water. They will be fine.)

You may notice that even with the rolling pin, I didn’t get the dough to adhere to itself perfectly. This meant that one side of my plăcintăs didn’t end up looking quite as nice as the other, but they still cooked up and tasted just fine.

Now, at this point, different recipes I found online suggested that the plăcintăs could be either baked or fried. I’m sure baking them would be nice, too, but (a) the sources I found that were unambiguously written by actual Moldovans tended to say to fry them, and (b) frying things is delicious. Frying it was!

I poured a few tablespoons of olive oil into a small frying pan and set the burner to low-to-medium heat. (My stove has numbers from 1-10 on the dials for the burners; I had the relevant dial set to just a smidge under “4.”) I put the first of my cheese plăcintăs into the pan and cooked one side of it until it was golden brown. I then flipped it over, splashed oil all over my hand, screamed in pain, and stuck my hand under cold water for a couple of minutes while feeling very, very grateful that I was using the aforementioned low-to-medium heat instead of a higher one. I highly recommend skipping that step and just flipping your plăcintăs more carefully. (My hand is okay now – definitely sore, but the lower cooking temperature and the distance the oil had to travel through the air before actually landing on me meant that I only ended up with pretty minor first-degree burns. It basically looks and feels like I sunburned random patches of my hand. But still, skip that step.)

Once I’d recovered enough to cook the other three cheese plăcintăs until they were all golden brown on both sides, I did the same thing (minus the burning myself) with another small frying pan, vegetable oil, and the apple plăcintăs. Once I was done, I had two sets of four plăcintăs, which looked like this on the outside:

It’s hip to be square.

…and like this on the inside:

Apple on the left, cheese on the right. You know, in case you can’t tell the difference between apples and cheese. (And no, I don’t know why everything is tinted differently in the two photos, despite being shot under the exact same lighting roughly five minutes apart, beyond “my cell phone and its camera are not very good.” Both kinds of pastry are the same color, despite looking different here.)

THE VERDICT

Pretty good!

The apple plăcintăs had a slight issue – because I couldn’t smash them down as much as the cheese ones, the “folded” side was noticeably thicker than the non-folded side (as you can see in the picture above), and thus the inner layer of dough on the thick side couldn’t get fully cooked in the frying pan without overcooking the outer layer of dough. This was pretty easily remedied by cooking the outsides appropriately and then sticking the sliced-open plăcintă halves in the microwave for a minute or so, but it would have been nice if they could have cooked more evenly in the first place. Truth be told, the apple ones weren’t anything special – it is nearly impossible for spiced apples and fried dough to taste anything other than yummy, and they did, in fact, taste yummy, but I already have an apple donut recipe that I love and which does the spiced-apples-and-fried-dough thing even better, so I can’t really imagine I’ll make apple plăcintăs again.

The cheese ones are another story. They are yummy in a much more distinctive way – the mix of mozzarella and feta worked exactly as I’d hoped (the feta absolutely dominates flavor-wise, but the mozzarella helped the filling get nice and melty), the dill makes it much more unique-tasting than cheese alone (or cheese and parsley) would have been, and it all works really well with the soft-but-flaky pastry exterior. I don’t know that I actually liked the cheese plăcintăs better than the apple ones, per se (like I said, apples and fried dough are pretty much inherently delicious), but I found them a whole lot more interesting. I think there’s a very good chance I’ll make them again (and hey, maybe I’ll still split the recipe in half and try yet another possible plăcintă filling next time, because I found recipes for at least five or six different types of plăcintă when I was doing my research for this week, and almost all of them sounded good).

THE INGREDIENTS

For the dough:

1 packet active dry yeast
1/3 cup milk
1 tsp sugar
3 cups flour
1 tsp salt
2/3 cup buttermilk
1 egg
4 tbsp oil (olive or vegetable oil, depending on what kind of plăcintăs you’re making), plus more for frying the plăcintăs

(For apple plăcintăs only:
1/4 cup sugar + enough additional flour to de-sticky-ify the dough)

For the apple filling:

3 tart apples
2-3 tsp (ish?) sugar
2-3 tsp (ish?) brown sugar
cinnamon to taste
nutmeg to taste
cloves to taste

For the cheese filling:

1 1/4 cups (ish?) feta cheese
1/2 cup (ish?) mozzarella
1/2 tsp dill
handful of fresh chopped parsley