Pie on the Fly

In lieu of proper blogging, I'm posting pictures of Russian pies this week. That's cabbage pie, a cheesecake-like pie called vatrushka and mushroom pie. My mom made these, I don't have the recipe, nor do I plan to recreate them myself since I'm not that into Russian baking these days. (I couldn't find many reliable-sounding recipes for Russian pies, so if you know of any, please share.)

However, to make this more of a proper blog post, I will share a few cultural factoids about Russian pies:

• You may know about pirozhki (пирожки, plural; пирожок, singular), which are small, pastry-like pies.
• A pizza-sized pie like the one above is called a pirog.
• The Russian word pirog (пирог) stems from the word "pir" (пир), which means feast.
• Popular pie fillings for Russian pies are cabbage (sauteed with onions and mixed with hard-boiled eggs), mushrooms, fish and rice, and for pirozhki, potatoes, ground beef, or fruit. I once blogged about making mushroom pie.
• A vatrushka (ватрушка) is a pastry filled with farmer's cheese (also known as tvorog/творог). I made vatrushki (ватрушки, plural) back in the day.

Zapekanka

I’m having problems with zapekanka. It’s a kind of Russian cheesecake made from curd cheese (also called farmer's cheese or tvorog in Russian; see my recipe here). I’ve played with recipes from old Russian cookbooks, the kind that don’t have precise measurements or baking times. Normally this isn’t a problem—I never measure ingredients and substitute them at will. This works pretty well for me, except, of course, when baking. It doesn’t help that farmer’s cheese is a soggy ingredient, so some guidelines come in handy here.

Unfortunately there aren’t too many zapekanka recipes out there—this one, by a Russian-born food blogger, is probably the closest to what I’m looking for. I’ve always thought of zapekanka as a breakfast food or a light dinner, not dessert, however. Anyway, I had some leftover curd cheese last week, and I improvised this recipe:

1.5 cups curd cheese mixed with a bit less than ¼ cup sugar, ½ tsp. vanilla extract, 3 tbs. flour, ½ tsp. baking powder and an egg yolk. The egg white was beaten until peaks formed and added to the rest of the ingredients. I also tossed in some raisins (any kind of dried fruit works well in a zapekanka). I baked the whole thing in a buttered, 9-inch pan at 370 degrees for about 45 minutes. The final product was beautifully golden and airy, although it quickly sank once it left the oven. It was also a bit soggy and too sweet, just like two previous attempts.

So, readers, any advice for making a successful zapekanka? Recipes in Russian are welcome. (I don't usually search online in Russian because I can't read it as fast as English--blame first language attrition.)

Farmer's Cheese Cake with Apples

I did some tweaking in my old and all-time popular post: how to make your own farmer's cheese (also known as curd cheese and, in Russian, tvorog). Check it out and give cheesemaking a shot. What can you do with a few cups of farmer’s cheese? Make cheesecake. Cakes and pastries with farmer’s cheese are very popular in Russia and Eastern Europe.

One of my favorite dessert recipes comes from the excellent Estonian food blog Nami Nami. It’s for an airy curd-cheesecake with grated apples. I’ve made it once before, for Thanksgiving. Here's a slightly revised version:

Preheat the oven to 370. Grease a 9-inch pie pan.

Finely chop 1/4 cup each of apricots and dried plums (don’t call them prunes). Place in a small bowl, along with 1/4 cup raisins, and cover with boiling hot water. Put aside.

Combine 60 grams flour, ½ tsp. baking power, 50 grams sugar and ¾ tsp. cinnamon in a bowl. Peel, core and finely chop two large apples, preferably a tart variety like Granny Smith. Separate two eggs, and beat the egg whites until they form soft peaks.

In another bowl, mix 250 grams farmer’s cheese, 100 grams sour cream or Greek yogurt and ½ tsp. vanilla extract. Fold in the dry ingredients. Add the apples and the egg yolks; drain the dried fruit and add to the mixture; then add the egg whites. Mix well.

Pour the batter into the pie pan; bake 45-55 minutes, or until the top of the cake is firm and golden-brown. Let cool before eating, but serve warm, if possible. Goes great with strawberry jam.

Cheese-Making Disaster

I've been successfully making farmer's cheese for more than three years. The recipe blogged here is tried and true, and, until this weekend, I had only one cheese-making disaster.*

Then I tried a recipe for farmer's cheese from Anya von Bremzen's Russian cookbook Please to the Table. It's good to try something new and different, right? Plus, I love this cookbook and often use it for inspiration (if not for the recipes).

So I followed Anya's instructions, mixing milk with sour cream (my recipe uses milk and buttermilk). I waited 48 hours until this mixture formed curds and whey (my recipe takes 24 hours). I did the required straining and draining. I dumped the cheese, which looked pretty good, into a bowl. Then I tried it...and spit it out.

I can't remember a time when I made something so awful that I couldn't even taste it. I'm a competent-enough cook that this doesn't happen. Until now. Why was Anya's farmer's cheese so bitter? What went wrong here? Food chemists, help me out.

*I once used buttermilk containing sodium citrate to make farmer's cheese, and ended up with a bitter, milky pancake instead of mild, fluffy cheese curds.

Zucchini Cheese Pie

This Mediterranean vegetable cheese pie has been on my mind ever since Ann at Redacted Recipes blogged about it. I’ve been meaning to whip it up this week, but when the time came I didn’t have most of the ingredients. That rarely stops me, however, so I’d like to present my take on a vegetable cheese pie: a layer of zucchini covered with ricotta-parmesan-pepper-tomato topping. I actually used homemade farmer’s cheese (aka my famous tvorog) in place of ricotta, which worked very well. A nice discovery, as I rarely use farmer’s cheese in savory recipes.

Method: I covered the bottom of a round, foil-lined pie pan with thinly sliced, salted zucchini rounds and roasted them at 425 until they were soft, 20 minutes or so. (You could also sauté the rounds in olive oil instead.) In the meantime, I combined a cup of farmer’s cheese with an egg, ¼ cup of grated parmesan, a couple of ounces of mozzarella, some leftover roasted red and yellow peppers, and a little leftover tomato sauce. (You could leave out the peppers and tomatoes just as well, or use other vegetables in their place.)

I spread this mixture over the soft zucchini, and baked the pie at 425 until the cheese was firm and golden-brown, about 25 minutes, plus the last five minutes under the broiler. The pie tastes best lukewarm, so let cool 10-15 minutes.

Chocolate-Covered Sirki

A reader recently e-mailed me and asked if I knew how to make sirki (сырки). Sirki (literally "little cheeses") are small, cheesecake-like bars made with tvorog (farmer's cheese; similar to Quark cheese in Europe). I had never made sirki at home or tried storebought ones, so I did a little research: I asked my mom. She confirmed that sirki are made with tvorog and adds-ins like sour cream, vanilla, chocolate, nuts, raisins, etc.

Sirki were a favorite children's treat in Russia, and very small kids were sometimes plied with chocolate-covered sirki when they wanted ice cream. (I had never even tried sirki because, in the usual Soviet fashion, they disappeared from the stores around the time I was born.) [Update: I finally tried them when I went to Estonia and Russia in 2008.]

I found a few recipes for sirki-like desserts in Soviet cookbooks. The most common dessert is tvorozhnya massa ( "tvorog mold"), made by creaming butter and sugar, then adding eggs, tvorog and sour cream, and chilling the whole thing on a rounded plate. All this sirki talk was making me (and my mom) hungry for the real thing, so we bought some sirki from the Russian store in chocolate, almond and vanilla flavors. They tasted a lot like American-style cheesecake but were a bit tangy, like yogurt. Vanilla was the best of the bunch, but these sirki were cloyingly sweet and pricey.

Next I tried a recipe for chocolate-covered sirki from Anya von Bremzen's Russian cookbook Please to the Table. "These rich chocolate-covered cheese confections, sold in the dairy department in Soviet grocery shops, used to be a favorite childhood treat," writes Anya.

The recipe has you mix tvorog (I used 1.5 cups), 4 ounces cream cheese, sugar (Anya calls for 7 tbs; I used 3) and two egg yolks in a food processor. I also added 1 tsp. of vanilla extract. Then you add lemon zest, lemon extract and lemon juice, but I just used 3 tbs. of lemon juice. (The tvorog/cream cheese mixture has a lot of culinary promise. It had a nice, smooth texture and tastes like mousse.)

Wrap the mixture in a damp cheesecloth and place in a sieve that's set over a bowl. Cover the cheesecloth with a plate, put a weight on it (like a heavy can) and refrigerate overnight. The next day, use a small scooping spoon to shape the mixture into 1.5-inch balls.

Freeze the tvorog balls for half an hour to firm them up, then melt 12 ounces of decent dark chocolate in a saucepan or double boiler and let it cool a little. Anya calls for melting the chocolate with 3 tbs. of vegetable shortening; I used 1 tbs. and a splash of heavy cream. I think shortening smells and tastes like stale oil, even when it's fresh, so I'd avoid it completely and simply use heavy cream to make a ganache.

Dip the tvorog balls in the chocolate and let cool on a wax-paper covered plate. Chill in the fridge until the chocolate is firm. I ended up with 15 or 16 sirki. They tasted like little cheesecakes and would work well as dessert or post-dessert bites. I think you can experiment a lot with this recipe, using ricotta instead of tvorog, or sour cream instead of cream cheese, and nuts, chocolate or dried fruit in the tvorog mixture.

How to Make Tvorog (Farmer's Cheese)

Tvorog, a Russian dairy product, is known as farmer's cheese or curd cheese in the U.S. It's a cross between ricotta and cottage cheese, but doesn't really taste like either. Tvorog is immensely popular in Russia. It's eaten with jam and sour cream for breakfast, as a snack or as a light dinner, and is used in all sorts of sweet and savory baking. In America, you can sometimes buy tvorog in upscale or Eastern-European grocery stores, but it tends to be expensive.

Fortunately, it's easy to make tvorog at home. The process is a bit time consuming, but it requires almost no hands-on work. Here's what you do:

*In a soup pot, combine 1/2 gallon of milk (whole is best, but I've used low-fat and even skim without problems) with 2 cups of buttermilk. Do not use buttermilk containing sodium citrate! In Wisconsin, Kemps buttermilk is good and cheap.

*Place the milk/buttermilk mixture in a warm place until it develops the consistency of thick yogurt (a kitchen counter or the back burner of a stove work just fine). This will take about 24 hours. In the summer and in very warm homes, this may take only 12 hours.

*Place the pot containing the milk mixture over very, very low heat for about an hour. Choose the lowest setting on your stove. If you have a gas stove, use a flame tamer. Do not stir the milk.

*After about an hour, the milk will curdle, and the curds and whey will begin to separate. Take the milk off the heat.

*Let the milk cool for about 30 minutes. Line a sieve with a large piece of cheesecloth. Using a slotted spoon, carefully separate the curds (the thick, yogurt-y stuff) from the whey (yellowish liquid). Place the curds in the cheesecloth-lined sieve.

*The wet curds will look kind of gross, but don't worry. Soon enough you'll have fluffy, creamy tvorog.

*Gather the cheesecloth like a little bag, place the sieve over a bowl, and let the tvorog drain, preferably overnight, in the fridge.

*Next day, unroll the cheesecloth and scoop the tvorog into a bowl. You'll probably have one big chunk--break it up a little with a spoon. This is how it should look:

* Tvorog is used left and right in Russian baking, but sometimes it's best eaten fresh with a lump of jam and a little yogurt and sour cream.