Cooking experiment: Spinach Piroshkis
Nov. 7th, 2010 01:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tuftearsI really should try harder to resist the urge to do baking experiments... but well, here are my findings from my latest efforts.
I started off with the dough recipe from Taylor's Piroshki . Instead of the beef filling recommended, I used a mix of spinach with half an onion and half a pepper, some deli slices of turkey, and a bit of cheese, with egg as a binder. Here's the filling:
Problem number one: as comments on the recipe I used suggest, you do need a lot more flour than the recipe claims, in order to get the dough to bind properly. I'd guess about 7 cups of flour total. Could be because I used wheat flour instead of standard flour?
Also, I did a bad job of measuring the salt needed, trying to gauge how much I needed by sprinkling salt in - unfortunately I couldn't tell that until I tasted the finished product. Now that I know the bread dough isn't salty enough, I can fix that for the remaining unbaked piroshkis, by sprinkling salt on them before I bake them.
Here, you can see a finished piroshki ready to bake. I made six total about this size and baked two tonight; the other four are in the fridge or freezer to be baked later.
A 'golfball'-sized lump of dough can be flattened out into a pretty sizable circle, as it turns out, but even so, I had to be careful about how much filling I used. I tended to put too much filling in, making it hard to close and seal the piroshki. One thing I had to be careful about was pressing the dough too thin, causing it to tear when I tried to fold it over. You can see the problem child below on the left:
This illustrates problem number three: I left a lot of flour on the piroshkis, as a result of having made them on a 'lightly floured surface'. I was able to remove most of it after baking, but it would be better if I had either fried the piroshki, or applied an "egg wash" (mix a bit of egg with some water and coat the piroshki in it).
And here's problem number four! I put them in the toaster oven directly on the grill... Which caused it to form ridges on the underside, like those seen here. I need to make sure to bake these things on a baking pan or a piece of aluminum foil to prevent unsightly marks like these. The thickness seems okay, makes it solid enough you can hold it like a handmeal rather than having to use a fork.
Taste-wise, it's all right; I think it needs more salt in the bread dough than I put in (my mistake). It would probably have worked better to mix feta cheese or ricotta cheese into the filling, like a calzone.
Also, this all took a lot of time... Though it's probably something I could get better at doing in a timely fashion if I practiced.
Still, an interesting experiment... And one not quite concluded yet since I still have some uncooked piroshkis left that I can fix.
I started off with the dough recipe from Taylor's Piroshki . Instead of the beef filling recommended, I used a mix of spinach with half an onion and half a pepper, some deli slices of turkey, and a bit of cheese, with egg as a binder. Here's the filling:
Problem number one: as comments on the recipe I used suggest, you do need a lot more flour than the recipe claims, in order to get the dough to bind properly. I'd guess about 7 cups of flour total. Could be because I used wheat flour instead of standard flour?
Also, I did a bad job of measuring the salt needed, trying to gauge how much I needed by sprinkling salt in - unfortunately I couldn't tell that until I tasted the finished product. Now that I know the bread dough isn't salty enough, I can fix that for the remaining unbaked piroshkis, by sprinkling salt on them before I bake them.
Here, you can see a finished piroshki ready to bake. I made six total about this size and baked two tonight; the other four are in the fridge or freezer to be baked later.
A 'golfball'-sized lump of dough can be flattened out into a pretty sizable circle, as it turns out, but even so, I had to be careful about how much filling I used. I tended to put too much filling in, making it hard to close and seal the piroshki. One thing I had to be careful about was pressing the dough too thin, causing it to tear when I tried to fold it over. You can see the problem child below on the left:
This illustrates problem number three: I left a lot of flour on the piroshkis, as a result of having made them on a 'lightly floured surface'. I was able to remove most of it after baking, but it would be better if I had either fried the piroshki, or applied an "egg wash" (mix a bit of egg with some water and coat the piroshki in it).
And here's problem number four! I put them in the toaster oven directly on the grill... Which caused it to form ridges on the underside, like those seen here. I need to make sure to bake these things on a baking pan or a piece of aluminum foil to prevent unsightly marks like these. The thickness seems okay, makes it solid enough you can hold it like a handmeal rather than having to use a fork.
Taste-wise, it's all right; I think it needs more salt in the bread dough than I put in (my mistake). It would probably have worked better to mix feta cheese or ricotta cheese into the filling, like a calzone.
Also, this all took a lot of time... Though it's probably something I could get better at doing in a timely fashion if I practiced.
Still, an interesting experiment... And one not quite concluded yet since I still have some uncooked piroshkis left that I can fix.
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no subject
Date: 2010-11-07 11:44 am (UTC)To me, anyway. I'd rather spend time making a nice steak and roasted vegetables. :)
no subject
Date: 2010-11-07 04:26 pm (UTC)This is basically research into ways to make my elderly mother eat more vegetables, thus the dominance of spinach in the filling.
Anyway, it was educational! And kinda fun.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-08 01:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-08 02:03 am (UTC)... Which is a pretty reasonable idea, really. The filling is the easy part to make.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-08 07:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-08 04:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-08 11:11 pm (UTC)