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.
