Some of the recipes of ancient Slavic dishes are used to the present, but there are undeservedly forgotten ones, and one of them is a traditional kurnik, a special kind of cake that used to be considered festive dishes in the old days, and today far from every host doesn’t she doesn’t know how to cook it, but she’s never even tried it. How to cook a kurnik? What foods are needed for our ancestors' favorite dish? If questions arise, then there must be answers.
How to cook a kurnik?
Ingredients:
- Puff pastry (you can take ready-made that our grandmothers could not afford) - 600 g;
- Pancakes (cooked according to any of the usual recipes) - pieces 7;
- Chicken fillet - half a kilogram;
- Rice - ½ cup;
- Eggs - 2 pcs.;
- Green onion - 2 bunches;
- Butter - 100 g;
- Milk - ½ cup;
- Onion (large) - 1 pc.;
- Champignons - 300 g;
- Dill - 1 bunch;
- Pepper and salt to taste.
Cooking:
- Before you prepare the kurnik, first prepare the filling of three different types (you can at your discretion).
- Rice is cooked until cooked, add butter and chopped green onions. Hard-boiled eggs are ground on a grater, added to rice, stirred.
- Boil the chicken, cut into small cubes. The remaining butter is melted in a frying pan, milk is added, a little flour, salt and seasoned with pepper to taste, boil over low heat to the consistency of sour cream, add chopped chicken and stew for 5-10 minutes.
- Mushrooms are fried with finely chopped onions until golden in hot vegetable oil, pepper and salt are added to taste, also finely chopped dill. The filling is ready, now we go directly to how to make the kurnik.
- Puff pastry is divided into two equal parts, rolled out and from one half of the dough previously rolled out, a circle is cut out into which the filling is laid out in layers, each of the two layers, separated by pancakes. How to cook a kurnik is up to you - you can stack the filling in three layers, you can in six - correctly in both cases. When the filling is laid out, cover the pie with the remaining rolled-out layer of dough, press it tightly around the edges, and cut off its excess so that the cake turns out in a shape resembling a mound — voluminous and round. It is necessary to ensure that air does not get under the dough, tightly press it with your hands. Fasten the edges of the cake and wrap them up. To decorate the henhouse, scraps of dough are used - various figures, pigtails are fashioned from them, they are laid on top and pressed tightly.
- How to cook a chicken in the oven? It is necessary to heat the oven to a temperature of about 200 degrees and bake until a golden crust of a beautiful color is formed. Since the cake is stuffed with a completely prepared filling, baking does not take much time and corresponds to about 15-18 minutes. To give the cake an even more appetizing appearance, the surface of the henhouse is smeared with a beaten egg - in this case, the crust is even more attractive - crispy and golden.
There are many different ways to make a kurnik, for which they use not only puff pastry, as in our case considered above, but also shortbread, as well as yeast or fresh. The filling is chosen depending on the season and personal taste preferences, the main thing is that it be multi-layered, and the layers are separated by the most ordinary pancakes, otherwise it will not be a henhouse, but some other pie. Everything is quite simple, no special tricks and special skills are required, and the result will impress and allow you to try the old dish of our distant ancestors, which they specially prepared for weddings and especially solemn holidays, we will not forget the traditions.