Recipe: Paczki

Most people know paczki (singular: Pączek) as a Polish doughnut, jelly doughnut, or as Berliners (pretty much the same thing.)  They are a soft, yeast-dough doughnut, traditionally filled with rose hip jam.
Paczki are imbedded in Polish cuisine like wódka, piernik, and pierogi.  On Fat Thursday (Tłusty Czwartek, the Thursday before Lent.  The French have Mardi Gras and the Poles have Tlusty Czwartek), Poles traditionally eat paczki.  Businesses order them by the bushel for their employees (I alone at five at work and brought another three home.)  The only downside is that Paczki don't keep very well and are best eaten fresh.  You can revive them by sticking them in an oven or microwave, but nothing beats that sinfully soft and chewy dough, mere moments from being pulled from the boiling vat of oil (get it all in before Lent.)

Without much further ado, here's a traditional recipe:

1 kg flour
100 grams yeast
1/2 liter milk (warm)
7 yolks
1 whole egg
3/4 cup sugar
100 grams butter (melted, cooled)
1 jigger (shot) of rum or spirytus (grain alcohol)
Juice of 1 lemon
Pinch of salt

1.5 liters of cooking oil plus 2 spoonfuls of lard
Rose hip confiture (or any other fruit preserve) for the filling
Powdered sugar for dusting (or a mixture of lemon juice and powdered sugar for a glaze.) (Optional)
Candied orange peels (cubed into small pieces) (Optional)

Mix the yeast and 2 teaspoons of sugar and 2-3 teaspoons of flour with a little bit of milk and warm water until it starts foaming.  In a large bowl, beat together the egg and yolks and sugar.  Add in the milk, butter, yeast mixture and then flour.  Mix together and add in lemon juice and alcohol.  Knead for 20 minutes, cover in a bowl and let rise for 30 minutes to an hour.
Punch down the dough.  Place the dough on a floured cutting board and roll it into a thick rope.  Cut the dough into 1.5 cm lengths and roll out into fat pancakes.  Add a spoonful the fruit preserves to the center of every-other pancake. Seal the paczki well using the other 'pancake', making sure they are round.  Place the paczki on a floured surface, cover them, and let them rise for 30 minutes to an hour.
In a wide, shallow pot or wok, gently boil the oil and lard.  Add the paczki to the oil, flipping them occasionally so they cook equally on either side—a nice brown.  Set the fried paczki on a grate to drip dry or on paper towels.  Place on a plate and dust with powered sugar, or sprinkle with candied orange pieces and drizzle with glaze.

Smacznego!

Recipe: Knedle

Knedle are traditional potato-dough dumplings, usually filled with an entire plum.  They are incredibly filling and can serve both as a dessert and as a dinner (being so filling.)  They are actually really easy to make and popular with kids and adults alike.

Ingredients:
3 lb of potatoes

2 cups of flour

1 egg

3 pounds of plums
Sugar

Pinch of salt

Peel and boil the potatoes, then drain well.  In a large pot, start boiling some water.  In a bowl, mash the potatoes, and mix in flour, salt, and egg.  If the dough is too sticky, add more flour until a nice consistency is reached.  Pit the plums by butterflying them (slice one side pole-to-pole) and taking out the stone.  Fill the plums' centers with a teaspoon of sugar (sugar cubes are great for this), close them, then wrap the plums in dough.  Drop the knedle into the boiling water and cook until they float.  Remove with a slotted spoon.

You can serve the knedle as they are, or fry them in a slight bit of oil (not unlike pierogi).  You can also serve them in a sweet cream sauce.
In the holiday season, feel free to add a pinch of some spices to the dough (such as cinnamon or nutmeg.)  Knedle keep well when they are frozen, so prepare them when plums are in season, then freeze.  You can serve them all winter and spring, just drop the frozen balls into boiling water.

Freshly-made knedle.

Happy Pi Day!

Happy Pi Day, everyone! Now go back some fucking pie!

In case you didn't know, the first three digits of Pi are 3.14. Today's date just happens to be March (3) fourteenth (14): 3.14.2010. The real Pi day happened some four-hundred years ago in 1592 (hey, 100 years after Columbus sailed the ocean blue!)

My best is the first sixteen digits: 3.141592653589793. There are others that can do it to tens of thousands of places (where do they find the time?)

Interestingly enough, they really don't have pies here in Poland, and are quite befuddled when I try to explain them.

"See, pies aren't quite like cakes. They're more like torts or tarts. You have a crust and you fill it with stuff and then you can put some more crust on top. For example, a pizza is a pie."

Then I send them off thinking that apple pie or pumpkin pie (staples of American desert cuisine) are hideous concoctions of pizza dough, sauce and said apples/pumpkins. I need to work on my explanations a bit.

Also, Pi is pronounced "pee" here, much to my eternal humor.

Recipe: Szarlotka (Apple Cake)

A traditional layered apple cake that serves quite well as a coffee cake.

OK, but before we get started, I'm going to go off on the lack of vanilla extract here. In my baking, I usually use gallons of the stuff; here, they have aromat waniliowy (basically the scent of vanilla) and vanilla sugar. Vanilla sugar works best because it actually has the vanilla flavor; the other stuff just makes your cake/cookies/pastry smell like vanilla (kind of stupid, right?) I haven't been able to procure some vanilla beans, so I'm stuck using packets of vanilla sugar.

Also, they do a lot of measuring by weight here (in metric too. Double whammy.) So I just converted it to English units.

1 lb of flour plus a little more

5.5 ounces of powdered sugar

5 egg yolks (or just use the whole egg.)

5.5 ounces of oil

5 ounces of butter

1 tsp baking powder (optional)

Dash of almond oil (optional)

3.5 lb of apples

Preheat oven to 350º F.

Combine everything but the apples and mix into a dough. Wrap the dough up and put it in the fridge to chill for at least an hour. Peel and shred the apples (mashing them into apple sauce also works.) Take about 2/3 the dough and spread evenly into a greased cake pan or baking dish. Spread the apples evenly on top of the dough.

Next, there are two ways of adding the remaining 1/3 of the dough. You can just spread it on and shove that sucker in the oven; or, shred the dough with a grated and sprinkle it atop the apples. Regardless of how you apply the top layer of dough, stick it in the oven for 30-45 minutes. After it's done, you can dust it with powdered sugar.

Recipe: Piegusek (Poppy Seed Cake)

This is a cake recipe that I've acquired recently and it is quite delicious. So, go and bake it. It's a little scant on baking instructions (it comes straight out a family's collection of recipes) but I'll try my best to guide it.

1 cup poppy seeds

1 cup flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 cup oil

1 cup egg yolks (keep egg whites.)

1 cup sugar

Confectioner's sugar

Preheat oven to 350º F. In a bowl, mix the poppy seeds with the oil; add yolks, flour, and baking soda. Knead dough. Whip the egg whites with the sugar and combine with the rest. Spread evenly in greased cake pan or baking dish, making sure that it has an even depth. Bake 30-45 minutes.

The piegusek can be cut into squares like a coffee cake and sprinkled with powdered sugar.