Tatar cuisine

Programme Episodes (04.06.2011)

Tatar cuisine

When it comes to Tatar cuisine, everybody usually thinks about pastry, because, there are a lot of different dishes made of dough. This includes baked dough, fried dough, pancakes, and stuffed cakes, which are called kystybyi. Just like Kazakh people, we stored up meat in the autumn and also called it sogym. When stocking up meat, we also made various meat delicacies, such as kazi. I remember that at that time we also baked delicious giblet pies.

INTRODUCTION

As you’ve probably figured out, we will cook a Tatar dish today. And we decided to turn to Filiza Islamovna with this mission. Hello, Filiza Islamovna! – Hello and Welcome! - What are we going to cook? - We will cook a Tatar dish called Shokyrsha.

Filiza Mambetzhanova likes precision in everything, she even approaches baking home-made pastry very carefully. Perhaps it’s because of such two jobs of our hero as a manufacturing engineer of the electrochemical industry and an economist.

IN THE KITCHEN

Schokyr is a little hole. – A hole in the dough? - Yes, in the dough. A pit is made out of dough, and there should be meat stuffing inside. First of all, we have to make the dough so as to leave it for some time. During this time, we will make the minced meat. Now we will grind the margarine with flour. For what? - To make the dough more airy. Of course, our grandmothers didn’t do this. They warmed it up. – That’s what we had a bucket for? - Yes, we had the bucket for this. But we will do it in a modern way. – With a new method. - Yes, in order to make the dough turn out to be more luscious and airy. Our dough will contain 200 grams of margarine, 200 grams of curds and half a cup of sour cream. You see, we have a coarse-grained cheese. Therefore, we will grind it through a grater too.

If you do not grind the curds, then it can rise to the surface in lumps, and when it is baked, it will burn, darken, and dark spots will appear. We add salt and soda to a mixture of flour and margarine. Now, we thoroughly mix all the ingredients in a bowl. It is better to put it in the fridge and leave it for some tine. - How long? – For about 20-30 minutes, while we’re making the minced meat.

The next stage of cooking involves beef. Here we have excellent beef. - However, it is not very fatty. It is best to prepare the minced meat out of a mixture with half of it containing lamb - so that it was fatter - yes, so that it is fatty. - Nevertheless, we solved the issue - yes, we have, we decided to add a little bit of sheep-tail fat. It will not spoil the taste, but it’s lamb meat after all. There will be a classic combination of both lamb and beef. – We just need to put it in the meat grinder.

We can add some pumpkin for the juiciness of our dish. Our grandmothers added mostly finely chopped pumpkin, onions and dried herbs, even dill seeds and anise.

Now we start sculpting ... our dish, which is called ... - Schokyrsha – That’s a difficult name. Should the dough necessarily contain curds? - Curds are optional, but you may use a milk mass, it’s called suzma in Tatar. - What is it? - It is made of sour milk, cooked like curds, but without bringing it to boil so that there are no grains. So when it just starts to boil you put it all in large cheesecloth, knot and hang it. Water flows down and then we have a homogeneous mass.

The dough has been rolled out. Here are our pieces. Now Filiza Islamovna will teach us to sculpt. Please show me how to do it and how to begin. – We will mold it like regular round patties. As regular round patties, but we will just make the crown taller. The patties are made round. Everybody probably knows triangle-shaped patties called uchpuchmak. Another form is when the dough sticks together at the top without a hole, in which sometimes good thick broth is poured.

RECIPE

Shokyrsha

Filling

600g of meat

300g of onions

10g of salt

5g of pepper

5g of spices

150g of water

Dough

600g of flour

200g of margarine