Pelmeni was the food item I remember eating the most in Russia. The fact that they were Siberian meat dumplings piqued my interest - how exotic in a land of meat and potatoes cuisine! Turns out that they too were meaty and simple, but oh so delicious. I ate them three different times in Russia and they were different each time I ate them.
The first order of pelmeni I ate was comparatively expensive and seemed to be prepared differently than the other two. (Maybe they were steamed?) The meat was more tender than the other two and there was an interesting spice combination in the meat mixture. I suppose that made it worth the money.
The second order of pelmeni was served in the water it was cooked in and was shaped sort of like tortelloni. It was cheap, plentiful, and delicious!
The third order of pelmeni was served without liquid and with vinegar as well as sour cream. Eating it with the vinegar made me wonder why I hadn't had it this way before.
To balance out the meal, I decided to make the tomato and cucumber salad I enjoyed each morning for breakfast in Novgorod.
I wish American breakfasts were as varied as Russian breakfasts. Along with blini (which are sort of like crepes), I usually ate an open faced sandwich with salami and cheese, some sort of lightly dressed slaw (either cabbage and carrot, red cabbage, or just carrot), and a lightly dressed tomato and cucumber salad that was absolutely delicious. There were also sweets, other meat options, and either coffee or tea (I went for the latter). Something for everyone!
The recipe I found included green pepper and onion, neither of which were in the original salad but both of which I have no problems with.
Both recipes are from
The Russian Heritage Cookbook and are incredibly simple to make.
Click the link below get to the cooking!
There were only four ingredients in the dough for the pelmeni: flour, salt, eggs, and water.
I blended the dry ingredients in one bowl and the wet ingredients in the other. The recipe said to put the dry ingredients into the wet but, as you can see from the sizes of bowls I used, I did it the opposite way. I know it makes a difference in some cases, but things turned out well enough.
Kneading the dough! I needed more water than the recipe called for because the dough was pretty dry. Maybe this is why I needed to put the dry in the wet.
After that, the dough needed to rest for an hour. There's a fancy pants way to shape the dough into a ball for resting, but I rarely work with dough so this is the best I could do. It worked well enough!
As the dough rested, I chopped the following vegetables for tomato and cucumber salad:
Ignore the butter - that's for the pelmeni. The vegetables in this picture were chopped up and put in a rather large bowl.
I mixed up the meat filling afterward. It consisted of ground beef, onion, a bit of butter, salt, and pepper. It wasn't in the recipe, but remembering the spices in the first order of pelmeni I ate in Russia, I added garlic powder and dill. I figured the dill would work well because pelmeni is usually garnished with dill and I didn't have fresh dill on hand. (I ought to try growing dill. Shouldn't be too difficult, considering it's called dill
weed...)
Mixing the two parts of the pelmeni was easy enough. The difficult (well, time consuming) part was putting the two together.
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| The stages of pelmeni preparation from left to right. |
The recipe said to roll out the dough. As I said, I don't work with dough very often so I don't own a rolling pin. I used the next best tool: my hands. The dough was quite elastic so it was difficult to keep it stretched, but I managed. After putting a bit of meat in the dough, I pressed together the sides (and was glad I didn't need water to hold it together) and made it pretty with a very simple fold!
My friend Amber was staying at my house, so I enlisted her help. Having someone around to talk to and fold these with made the work go faster. Many thanks to Amber for helping me fold these!
I dropped them into boiling salted water and let the magic happen.
Finished! The dough puffed up more than I think it should have, but they turned out well otherwise.
Remember that salad? I dressed it and forgot to take a picture of the dressing. Imagine a pale pinkish blend of vegetable oil, red wine vinegar, salt, and pepper. A rougher chop would've made the salad easier to eat without a spoon, but it was delicious anyway.
The spread! I served the pelmeni with vinegar and sour cream. The vinegar's much tastier with the pelmeni, in my opinion. Unfortunately, the vinegar I used tasted like something one would clean with instead of something one would eat... oh well.
I didn't have enough dough for the filling. It's not the fault of the recipe as much as it's a fault of me putting in one and a half pounds of ground beef where I should've put in a pound or less. I made another batch of pelmeni and
still had leftovers. I ended up frying the rest of the meat in patty form and eating it with a bit of the salad. This filling would go well inside blini!
Next time (other than making less of the filling), I intend to saute the onions first because cooked onions are easier on my stomach.
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