Traditional vegetarian dishes from Central-Eastern Europe, #1. Pogácsa

I have been a vegetarian (when I visit my grandma, a flexetarian*) since a year and a half. When I started (in Tallinn) a lot of people around me were vegan and vegetarian, and many other friends were about to start. Hence it was very easy to transition and stop eating meat. However I often hear that Central and Eastern-European food is impossible to be made vegetarian/vegan. That is simply not true! Most of our soups, pottages (warm vegetable curry without the exotic spices, usually with sour cream, paprika and garlic), and pasta dishes have no meat and little dairy (or eggs) involved. Of course we would not serve these for guests (especially not to guests from abroad!) because we wish to show the most tasty, spicy and lavish dishes we have, not the simple, every day meals we actually eat. This is why I came up with this idea, to show you recipes which are vegetarian or vegan but are traditional dishes people from my region eat weekly. Hopefully other bloggers join me soon to present our cuisine.

My first recipe is one of the simplest fingerfood, which we serve whenever guests are coming over, there is a party, or any occasion to celebrate, but you could also just bake a batch and casually snack on these any time of the day.

It is the Pogácsa (pogacha) which is not only tradidional in Hungary, but in the whole region including even Turkey.

For vegans: this recipe calls for cheese and sheep cheese, but you can easily skip those, substitute it with a spice of your choice, or to keep it traditional, diced onions. Switch the milk to soy (or your choice of plant-based) and switch the eggs to applesauce.

Ingredients:

• 500 g flour
• 100 g butter
• 250 g sheep’s cheese
• 2 eggs
• 25 g  yeast (try to get the regular, fresh one)
• 3 tbsp sour cream (creme fraiche)
• a small cup of milk (around 0.1 l )
• 3 generous pinches of salt
• 200 shredded cheese

1.) First make the yeast rise: warm up the milk (little hotter than body temperature, not too hot, otherwise you will kill the fungi). Put a teaspoon of sugar into the warm milk and crumble the yeast into it. Let it sit for 5-10 minutes.

2.) Pour the flour into a bowl, crumble the sheep’s cheese into it, add salt, and dice up the butter, crumble it into the batter. Then add the eggs and the sour cream and pour the yeast mixture into the bowl as well.

 

3.) Mix it thoroughly, and let it rise for at least 30 minutes. (Warm spot is the best, I usually put it up on the radiator, cover it with a lid or a cloth). In the meanwhile preheat your oven to 200 c.

4.) When it has risen, sprinkle some flour onto the surface where you would like to roll the dough out and roll the dough out thinly (1 cm). Sprinkle 1/3rd of the cheese on it, then fold it twice (into half, and again). Then roll it out for the second time, and sprinkle another third of the cheese, and do the folding. Roll it out for the last time, until it is around 2 centimetres.

 

5.) Pick a shot glass (or if you have a round cookie cutter that will do, however my mom always just does it with a shot glass) and cut out little rounds and place them onto a cookie sheet. Put the rest of the cheese on the top of the pogácsas, and bake it about 10-20 minutes.

 

 

Enjoy!

 

*Flexetarian is a fancy word for those who try to not eat meat but sometimes do.