Pies in Russian cuisine is a universal and comprehensive concept, just like the culinary traditions of our multi-ethnic people.
Various types of pastry, sweet and savory, in Slavic culture, in addition to their main purpose, served as symbols used in various rites.
Perhaps the Slavic rituals are already a bit forgotten, but pies are a favorite type of baking in our time, which gathers family and friends around the table, creating a feeling of celebration, well-being, wealth and comfort.
Pie with cabbage and meat - the basic technological principles
Pies - pastries with a filling, and it is not clear what is more important: filling or dough? Who likes what! If you like to have more stuffing, then this is a chicken roaster, in which the filling, moreover, consists of several types of minced meat. If a complex filling, then such a pie is called kulebyaka. Neither a pie - nor a pie, nor a big one - nor a small one, half-open from above, looks like a boat - it is a pie. Kulebyaka differs from kurnik: kurnik consists, as a rule, of two types of dough. Types of baking are not limited to the composition and shape of products, even in Slavic kitchens, not to mention the other national cuisines with their special traditions, a variety of fillings and dough.
A variety of cakes is also achieved by the types of the dough itself. In cooking, there is a generally accepted classification of dough: by the method of preparation, yeast (sour) or yeast-free (fresh); consistency - thick or liquid (biscuit, liquid). Dough can be rich and non-rich. Under the baking means the addition to the dough not only sweet ingredients, but also eggs, dairy products, fats, fragrances. Also, the dough is different in the way of kneading. Yeast can be sponge and straight; yeast puff pastry is prepared only in a cold way. Fresh dough is distinguished according to the method of kneading the following types: choux, sand, biscuit and layered.
Any of the listed types of dough is suitable for a pie with cabbage and meat. Perhaps, only shortbread dough should be excluded from this list: it has a dry, crumbly and rather greasy texture, which is not quite consistent in its texture and taste with cabbage and meat. Separately, you need to stop at using biscuit dough for the pie with cabbage and meat. According to the established tradition, biscuit dough is mainly used for making confectionery, as it is considered sweet. It is also a delusion that the biscuit dough cannot be made lush and stable without the addition of sugar. The basis of the biscuit, providing the necessary air structure, is egg white and gluten flour, and sugar, on the contrary, weighs down the texture.
One can speak about the technology of dough preparation for a very long time, but from what has already been said it is quite clear that the cake with the same name can be cooked in different ways.
Now about the stuffing for savory pastries. This is any type of meat and meat offal, fish, eggs, vegetables, cottage cheese, cereals. The cooking time of meat and fish products significantly exceeds the duration of the dough, so for pies any kind of filling is pre-cooked: boiled, stewed, baked or fried. An exception may be cottage cheese, which, before forming the dough, is only brought to taste in a cold way. Some vegetables that do not require prolonged heat treatment are also wrapped in raw dough. These vegetables include cabbage, which can be put into the cake in any form: stewed, raw, sauced, boiled or raw.
Complex fillings consisting of several ingredients are prepared separately, mixed after cooling, and then flour products are formed. For cooking kurnik or kulebyaki each stuffing lay separately, not mixing. In these types of baking, the layers of the filling are separated by a dough layer prepared, as a rule, from a different type of dough that is different from the outer shell of the cake.
Pie with cabbage and meat can consist not only of these two toppings. Meat and cabbage are perfectly combined with eggs, rice, mushrooms, cheese.
In house baking housewives often tend to put more stuffing. Here you need to follow some rules. If the filling is wet and heavy, then the cake may not rise, the dough will remain raw and not baked. Consider these points. For each type of dough, a certain temperature regime is chosen, both during the preparation of the dough itself and during baking in the oven. It is also necessary to take into account not only the type of dough, but also the weight of the semi-finished product: it is better to bake large cakes on medium heat, raising the temperature only at the end of baking to create a beautiful, rosy appearance of the product. Before removing the cake from the oven, be sure to check its readiness with a wooden stick. You need to pierce the cake with it, and if the stick stays dry, then the baking is ready. The second right way to make sure that the cake is ready: a correctly baked product is always lighter than unbaked by weight. But this method is suitable only for those hostesses who have extensive experience in making pies.
Recipe 1. Pie with cabbage and meat from bulk dough
The easiest and fastest form in cooking is a filling or so-called “pancake” dough; for cake with cabbage and meat, you can use biscuit savory dough. The batter creates an interesting texture of the cake and adds to the assortment of pies with cabbage and meat one more kind - “flip-flops”, which can even be baked in a pan, on the stove, as usual they make an omelette.
Ingredients for minced meat:
Fried champignons
Chicken fillet, boiled
Cauliflower stewed
Browned onions
For the test:
Eggs 3 pcs.
Sour cream (20%) 100 g
Salt
Flour 200 -250 g
Cooking:
For the filling, use the ingredients in equal quantities. The total mass of the filling should be approximately the same as the mass of dough.
Fry cauliflower and champignons in butter, cut into plastics, season them with spices, garlic. At the end of frying, put boiled fillet cubes, browned onion into the frying pan.
Sift flour, add 10-15 g of soda and 5-6 g of salt. Stir the dry mixture.
Separate the whites and yolks of the cooled eggs and whisk them to a stable foamy consistency. In the yolks add sour cream, one spoon, connecting it previously with the sifted flour. Combine proteins with dough, gently, but quickly mix and pour the prepared mass into the pan with the filling. You can bake in the oven, which is preheated. The filling in this case must be shifted to a lubricated form.
To cook in a pan, cover it with a lid, immediately after you pour the dough into it and set the lowest temperature setting.
Put the finished cake on a dish, cut into portions, after it has cooled slightly. Decorate with greens. Sour cream sauce or sour cream will perfectly fit this cake.
Recipe 2. Pie with Cabbage and Meat: Chicken
This baking option, according to tradition, was baked for the wedding, for Easter and Christmas. Kornik - a pie that deserves to be central to the festive table. Each hostess tries to stuff Kornik with the most sophisticated types of fillings. But we must not forget that these fillings should be in harmony with each other. Kurnik for the Christmas table in the old days stuffed even with coins.
For minced meat:
Braised cabbage with ryazhenka
Fried meat (pork fillet)
Marinated mushrooms (chanterelles)
Boiled rice with onions and carrots
For pancakes:
Eggs 2 pcs.
Water 50 ml
Sugar 50 g
Milk 100 ml
Salt 5 g
Soda 6-7 g
Flour 150 g
Oil, vegetable (refined) 75 ml
For test:
Yeast, pressed 100 g
Milk, warm (3.2%) 150 ml
Eggs 3 pcs.
Margarine 70g
Sugar 90 g
Salt
Wheat flour (premium) 350-400 g
Cooking:
Beat 3 eggs in foam, add warm milk, sugar, salt, softened margarine and 150 - 200 g of flour to them. Stir the batter with a spatula, cover the dishes with film and place the dough near the plate. Opara should rise at a temperature of 20-25ºC. Then add the rest of the flour and knead the dough to medium density. The finished dough should not stick to dishes and hands.
From the ingredients prepared for pancakes, mix the batter. Mix dry and liquid ingredients separately. Flour also pre-sift. In the liquid mass enter the flour piece by piece, mixing the dough with a whisk. Give the dough “rest” for about 20-30 minutes and bake pancakes in a pan with a diameter of 26-28 cm.
Chop 300 g of white cabbage and medium-sized onion; fry vegetables first on high heat, and then pour the dressing from 50 ml of ryazhenka, two tablespoons of sour cream and 30-40 ml of water, combined together. Season with salt and spices, add finely chopped dill, stew. When the sauce thickens enough and the cabbage is reddened, put it on a plate. Slice the mushrooms into slices.
Paste a small carrot and onion in melted butter and add 200-250 g of boiled crumbly rice, a little salt and pepper. Pork pulp, neck or tenderloin, finely chop or roll through a large meat grinder with a small onion. Add spices and simmer in a frying pan until cooked.
From the finished yeast dough, separate a small piece of dough for decorating the cake, and divide the rest in a 1: 2 ratio. Prepare a baking sheet to form a curd immediately on it: grease it with vegetable oil. On a work surface greased or floured, roll out a circle with a diameter of 30-31 cm and transfer it to a baking sheet. Place rice with carrots and onions in the center of the circle, spreading the filling over the surface of the dough, but retreating from the edge so that the filling can be completely covered with pancake. The shape of the chicken should be shaped as a slide, so try to move each layer of minced meat more towards the center. The next layer of minced meat is mushrooms. They also lay down, slightly receding from the edge of the pancake, which separates the rice and mushrooms, forming a small bulge in the center of the pie. The next layer is the pancakes on which to lay the meat, as well as the previous layers of the filling. The top layer of the filling is cabbage. Cover it with baked pancakes too. Roll out a large circle of dough to cover the entire cake, and secure the edges of the bottom and top dough layers. From a small piece of dough left to decorate the cake, make a “pigtail” or flagellum, or roll out a strip, 3 cm wide, and make cuts in the form of leaflets. Lay the strip around the circumference of the cake, covering the junction of the two layers. You can also cut twigs to decorate the entire surface of the cake. Before you put the curly pieces of dough, lubricate the surface with protein or just slightly wet with water to carefully fix the elements of the ornament.
Immediately after proofing, bake the cake at 180ºC. We define readiness with a wooden stick: despite the complex and juicy stuffing, after piercing the finished cake, the stick should remain dry.
Recipe 3. Pie with cabbage and meat: a pie with a complex filling
Ingredients:
Pork tenderloin
Prunes
Minced garlic
Grated hard cheese
Onions, white
Sauerkraut
Yeast dough
Cooking:
Slice the pork tenderloin, making transverse cuts. Beat off the meat very thinly and fry it on both sides, after rubbing it with a mixture of garlic and ground pepper. Cut the chops into small pieces. Slightly squeeze the cabbage, removing the extra brine so that the dough does not get wet. Steamed prunes cut into strips. Chop onions sweet variety. Stir all the ingredients of the filling.
Roll out the ready-made dough in the form of an oval 25x30 cm and place the ready stuffing, not reaching the edge of the dough. Top generously sprinkle the minced meat with grated cheese and zaschipnite dough, from the edge to the center. Place the pie on the prepared baking sheet, seam down. Treat the surface of the closed pie with whipped yolk, garnish with the ornament cut out of the dough and bake.
Recipe 4. Pie with cabbage and meat: a puff of yeast puff pastry
Ingredients:
For minced meat:
Cabbage shredded 150 g
Onion 50g
Goulash (pork or beef) 120
Carrots 70g
Sunflower refined oil 30 ml
Tomato paste 25 g
Spice
Oil (for frying and for form lubrication)
Egg 1 pc.
Yeast puff pastry 300 g
Cooking:
Heat the butter in a saucepan and simmer the finely minced meat until cooked, adding a little water or meat broth. At the end of stewing add chopped onion and grated carrot, season with a little spices. Put cabbage on top. For 3-4 minutes, cover the saucepan with the lid so that the cabbage is slightly steamed. Dissolve the tomato paste in an equal amount of water, bring the sauce to taste by adding ground spices: cloves, coriander seeds, dill, pepper, bay leaf, sugar and salt. Pour the sauce into the skillet and let it boil.
While the stuffing cools, preheat the oven and prepare a baking tray. Thawed puff pastry roll out a rectangle or oval. On two sides, in parallel, make cuts 5-6 cm long, at a distance of 1.5-2 cm. In the center of the rectangle, lay the minced meat in a slide. Leave the sauce when stewing, in a saucepan. It is even better if you pre-allow the sauce to drain by holding the stuffing in a metal sieve installed on the tray: the liquid should not spread along the dough when forming the basket. Close the stuffing with the edges of the dough, in which cuts are made, interlacing them together in the form of a pigtail. When the dough rises, send the wicker into the oven, after smearing its surface with a beaten egg. Ready, baked wicker, without removing from the pan, cover with a napkin to cool. After cut into slices and shift to a dish lined with a paper napkin.
Recipe 5. Pie with cabbage and meat, open
Ingredients:
Yeast dough 200 g
Mushroom sauce 100 g
Turkey fillet, boiled 300 g
Eggs 3 pcs.
Broccoli 150g
Cherry 250 g
Chopped Greens 50 g
Cooking:
Preheat oven to 200ºC. Grease the pan with grease. Roll out the finished yeast dough into a thin layer and form a circle and place it on the prepared baking sheet. Brush the edges with a beaten egg and lay a flagellum made from the same dough in a circle: it will serve as a side to prevent the sauce from flowing during the proofing and baking. Let the dough rise, and in the meantime prepare the filling.
Cut meat into cubes. Broccoli, cut into plates, boil for 6-7 minutes in boiling water and dip through a colander, season slightly with salt and pepper.
Prepare the mushroom sauce: finely chop the small onion, chop the garlic cloves and fry the vegetables in butter (50 g) in a pre-heated frying pan. Add 50 g dry porcini mushrooms (whole or ground) and pour 150-200 ml of drinking cream, preheated to 50-60C, into the pan. Five minutes after boiling add the chopped dill and parsley, and transfer the cooked sauce to the blender. Kill the mass to a thick, uniform consistency.
Beat the eggs. “Cherry” cut in half. Start laying the stuffing on the prepared dough. Smear the surface of the semi-finished product. Place evenly prepared fillet slices, broccoli and tomato halves. Put the cake in the oven and bake until the dough is ready. Remove the mold from the oven, pour the pie with whipped eggs and sprinkle with thick green onions, dill and parsley, then send it back to the oven to bake the eggs.
Recipe 6. Pie with cabbage and meat: unleavened puff pastry
Ingredients:
Mince, pork and beef 0.4 kg
Onions 100g
Salt pepper
Cabbage leaves 250 g
Egg 1 pc.
Ghee 120 g
Mashed potatoes 300 g
Dough: Flour 240 g
Margarine 70g
Salt
Soda 10 g
Sour cream 125 g
Cooking:
Sift flour on a work surface, add soda and salt; mix it up. Dice cold creamy margarine and roll the dice in flour until crumbs form. From flour and fat. Collect it a hill, make a groove and pour sour cream. Stir in a thick dough. Roll the bed, then roll it up in an envelope and roll it again. This operation must be repeated at least 16-20 times. If the heat in the room is warm and the dough heats up quickly, then interrupt the rolling process to cool the dough in the freezer: the dough should be cold when it is rolled. Until the filling is ready for the roll, also keep the dough in the refrigerator.
Cabbage leaves slightly repelled with a wooden hammer. Beat the egg, adding 20-30 g of flour, 50-70 ml of water, salt, ground black pepper and a slice of minced garlic. Dip the cabbage leaves in the cooked lemon and fry them very quickly in a hot frying pan, adding a small amount of melted butter. Put the leaves on a napkin to let them cool. Heat the pan again and fry the minced meat with onions until cooked. Chill.
Roll out the dough, forming a thin rectangle 30x40 cm. Put the cooked cabbage leaves on it, the next layer - minced meat, then - mashed potatoes. Form a roll. This is convenient to do if the dough is pre-laid on a silicone pad. Put the prepared semi-finished product on the prepared baking sheet and bake in the oven at 170-180ºC. Before you send the roll into the oven, grease the surface with lezonom. Serve the pastries, cut into slices. It is suitable garlic-peanut sauce with parsley.
Pie with cabbage and meat - tips and tricks
- Pies with meat and vegetable filling cannot be stored in the refrigerator for a long time. But you can, when they cool down, sealed in film and put in the freezer. Heated them then in the microwave, you need to immediately consume.
- When kneading dough, one should not forget that flour has a different degree of moisture, depending also on the conditions of its storage. Therefore, when kneading, you should not be guided by the figure indicated in the recipe, because this is an approximate weight, but by your tactile sensations.
- When kneading dough, add flour at the very last turn, adding and kneading it in small pieces so that the dough does not turn out too steep.
- Check the quality of the food before baking. In particular, this refers to the freshness of the yeast. To make sure that they work, even when preparing to prepare a straight dough, first dilute the yeast with warm liquid, adding a little flour and sugar. If after 5 minutes bubbles appear, then everything is in order - the cakes will turn out.
