Ukrainian food

Ukrainian food is one of the richest national cuisines. Its dishes are well known far away from Ukraine. And the Ukrainian recipes of the foods are very popular nowadays. Is anyone, who doesn’t know the Ukrainian Borsch?

The Ukrainian food is characterized with large number of components. For example the traditional Ukrainian food – borsch – contains 20 components. The peculiarities have the thermal processing of the products of the dishes. As a rule, there are used several types of thermal processing for the preparing of the food (frying, boiling, stewing, baking). The rules of food processing are strictly held in Ukrainian restaurants, to reach the best taste of the national dishes. The recipes of the Ukrainian cuisine include the number of different fruits and vegetables, as well as meat, poultry, fish, mushrooms and berries. The most common meat product is pork. The meat is present in large amount in first courses, among which the major one is borsch.

Among the traditional sweet foods the most popular are uswars (stewed fruits) and jellied fruits. To prepare sweet dishes are used plums, apples, pears, apricots, cherries, red currants, strawberries, wild strawberries, raspberries, honey, nuts. Ukrainian cuisine was always famous for the big number of foods with fruits and berries, raised on the Ukrainian lands.
The very tasteful are dishes, which stewed in ceramic pots: roast meat, curds with sour cream, stewed cabbage, potatoes with meat and prunes.

Ukrainian cuisine has dozens thousands of food recipes, which are characterized with plane food cooking and high taste qualities. The modern national culinary art preserved and
enriched the old
good traditions.

Ukrainian borsch recipe

2 beetroots
1 carrot
1 onion
4 potatoes
1/2 bulbs cabbage
4 tomatoes or 3 tablespoons piquant / pungent tomato sauce or 1 litre tomato juice
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon vinegar (3 %)
3 cloves garlic
3 pieces lard (or pork fat)
parsley
cooked meat broth (with meat): no less than 3 litre
bay-leaf
black pepper, pea-shaped (peppercorn)
salt
Ingredients for cooking borsh (for a five-litre saucepan)

How to cook Ukrainian borsch:
Directions:
Chop carrots and beetroots fine or grate it, chop onion. Put it into a small saucepan. Add to saucepan 1 tablespoon sugar, 1 tablespoon butter, some broth or water, 1 teaspoon vinegar.
Braise it all for 20 minutes, then add to a saucepan tomatoes and braise again for 20 minutes.
In a heavy saucepan with cooked meat broth, put chopped potatoes and cabbage and boil for 10 minutes almost to full readiness. Then add to the saucepan braised vegetable, black pepper (peppercorn) and bay-leaf to taste and boil again for 10 minutes.
Rub 3 cloves garlic, combine 3 pieces fine-chopped lard and rubbed garlic; add it all and some parsley to the saucepan.

Ukrainian Vareniki with potatoes recipe

Ingredients for Ukrainian Vareniki with potatoes:
for making dough: 325 g wheaten flour, 150 g water, 1/2 egg, sour cream to taste, salt to taste.
for making forcemeat: 560 g potato, 100 g onion, 40 g oil, ground black pepper to taste, salt to taste.

Directions:
Unleavened dough. Heat up a half-portion of water to 95 – 98 °C. Add the water in sifted flour and mix very well. Beat up eggs with salt and remaining water at room temperature. Mix well until the mixture has a homogeneous and thick texture and put in a warm place for 30 minutes.
Stuffing. Peel and boil potatoes, dry it a little and rub hot through a sieve, season with onion, fried in oil, pepper and salt (remain some portion of braised onion for seasoning cooked vareniki).
Roll out the dough into a 1,5 mm thick layer. Place prepared stuffing, shaped into balls, through a whole width of rolled out dough layer, stepping back 3 – 4 cm from its ends. Cover the stuffing with dough layer, pressing it around each ball, and cut vareniki out with a special form. Use again the remaining dough for rolling out.
Immerse each varenik separately into boiling salted water, separating it carefully from bottom of a saucepan with skimmer, and cook for 6 – 8 minutes at moderate boiling.
Take vareniks with skimmer out of a saucepan, let the water pour down, season vareniks with onion, braised in oil, and pour sour cream over it.

Pelmeni recipe

Ingredients for cooking Pelmeni:
for making pelmen dough:
3 glasses flavour
1 egg
2/3 glass water
1/2 – 1 teaspoon salt
for making forcemeat:
meat (different kinds of meat: pork, beef and mutton, taken in different proportions)
onion
salt
pepper
Directions:
Sift flour on the table; make a hollow on the top of appeared hill of sifted flour, break an egg there, add warm water, salt and knead heavy dough. Then cover the dough with lid or napkin and let it rest for 30 – 40 minutes.
Pelmeni will make in such a way: twist the dough into a rope, cut it into pieces and roll out each piece with rolling pin into a fine disc on a board, sprinkled with flour.

Napoleon Cake recipe

Ingredients for cooking Napoleon Cake:
3 glasses flour
8 eggs
250 g butter
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 glass water
1 tablespoon vinegar
How to cook Napoleon Cake:
Directions:
Pour out two glasses flour onto the board and beat up with butter. Form the appeared mass into a hill and add little by little in its centre an egg and water, mixed with salt and vinegar.
Knead dough, adding there remaining flour. Divide the dough into 8 – 9 parts. Put itin a cool place for 1 hour. Then roll out the dough into layers.
Boil about 1,5 litre milk with 7 – 8 tablespoons powdered sugar. Beat up and mix the remaining milk with egg yolks and starch. Add this mixture to the boiling milk and let it boil for 30 sec – 1 minute, stirring constantly.
Beat up 8 egg whites with 8 teaspoons sugar, adding the sugar little by little. Pour the boiling milk mixture into whipped egg whites and mix well with spoon.
Cut the baked and cooled dough in half lengthwise (into a top and a bottom) and smear with cream between both parts. An upper cake won’t be smeared, as far as I remember. It’s better to make the cake with two cooking persons: it’s faster and less troublesome. The cream will be risen high, have an ethereal texture and a lighter taste than buttercream.

Recipe of Homemade fried sausage

Ingredients for Homemade fried Ukrainian sausage:
1 kg pork
1 – 2 cloves garlic or 1/2 teaspoon marjoram
150 g lard (pork back fat)
thin pork intestines
broth
potatoes
1 onion
ground pepper
salt
How to cook Homemade fried Ukrainian sausage
Directions
Put pork through a meat grinder or chop it fine, add salt and ground pepper, rubbed garlic, onion, some broth, chopped lard (pork back fat), mix it all well and stuff thin pork intestines with this mass.
By stuffing pork intestines with the mass, twist it in each 15 – 20 cm. Then bind the ends of sausages.
Boil the sausages in salted water for 15 – 20 minutes and fry it in lard (pork back fat).
Separate the sausages from each other, put on a dish and pour fat of its frying over it.
Place fried potatoes on a dish around the sausages. Serve cucumbers, tomatoes, sauerkraut and greens separately.