2. Spread flour generously over the counter, the rolling pin, and the tray on which you’ll place the completed raw raviolis.
3. Make the dough. Put 2 ½ cups flour in a mixing bowl and mix in salt. Make a little well in the middle of the flour. Crack the egg in the well. Get a cup of ice-cold water. Using your pointer finger, whirl the egg around to scramble it, and then start whirling the edges of the flour into the egg, pouring the water into the well as you keep mixing in more dried flour. There will be a moment when you’re hands are totally coated with gooey dough, and you’ll ask: is this right? Just keep kneading and adding flour. Once the dough is a smooth, uniform mass, pull it in half and form two balls. Leave one ball in the floury bowl covered with a damp towel. And put the other on the floured counter.
4. Roll out the dough. Pat the dough ball into a disc on the floured counter and roll out with the rolling pin until it is 1 mm thick. Sprinkle flour on any surfaces that stick (the counter, the rolling pin, the top of the dough) and spread flour around with hands.
5. Make the raviolis. Use an overturned teacup, small drinking glass or circular cookie cutter to cut out circles. Put a teaspoon of filling in the middle of each circle. Separate the egg yolk from the white and scramble the yolk in a small dish. Use your finger or a tiny pastry brush to draw a rainbow of egg yolk (the glue) on the outer edge of the dough. Fold the dough-circle in half, aligning the edges. Press the facing edges together to seal the meat inside. Put the seamless side up and pull the pointy ends across each other on top of it, pressing the edges together. You should have a pelmen – the shape of a women’s pilgrim cap. As you finish each pelmen, place on a floured tray not touching one another and freeze. Once pelmeni are frozen put them all into a Ziplock and store in freezer for use as needed. Make the scraps into another ball of dough and repeat the process until you’re finished with the dough and filling.
6. Cook pelmeni (fresh or frozen) in boiling water with peppercorns, bay leaf, and salt, for 3-5 minutes after the pelmeni float. Serve hot with a dollop of butter, sour cream, vinegar, or cooking broth, and a sprinkling of fresh dill.
Copyright Lindsay Sterling January 2012
Something Other Than Chili
By Lindsay Sterling
My friend’s family only eats meat that he hunts: duck, venison, and moose. Because prime cuts on these animals are so few, ground meat is usually what the family has to work with. I guess I was feeling sorry for them. What’s for dinner? Chili. What’s for dinner? Sausage. What’s for dinner? Chili. What’s for dinner? Sausage. After my latest cooking lesson in an immigrant’s kitchen, I wanted to bust down that family’s door and rescue them, crying, “How about some Russian ravioli?”
Yulia Converse taught me how to make it. The dish in Russian is called pelmeni. Much like potstickers, ravioli, wontons, gyoza, perogis, and dozens of other Asian and European foods under different names, pelmeni are little packets of ground meat, wrapped in dough, and boiled, then sometimes fried. Legend has it, pelmeni came to Russia by way of Mongolia. Yulia explained, “Hunters would get an animal, and the whole village would make pelmeni.” The hunters would come home with their elk, deer, sheep, ibex, gazelle, wild boar, and/or auroch (the now-extinct ancestor to domestic cattle) and the wives would all gather to help make hundreds, even thousands, of pelmeni. Some of the women would make the dough out of flour, egg, and water, roll the dough out into sheets a millimeter thick and cut circles the size of a teacup rim. Others would mix the ground meat with minced onions, salt and pepper and put a teaspoon of meat on each circle of dough. The last group would fold the dough around the meat and press the bundles closed. The villagers would then keep pelmeni frozen outside and grab them to cook as needed. A mixture of pork and beef is the most popular filling today.
I wonder if the Mongolians invented the form, or if it was the Chinese before them, the Romans or some other peoples. I’m thinking the form has to be about as old as flour and eggs, so we’re talking as far back as 6000 BCE. Yulia got her recipe from a red journal filled neatly with handwritten Russian scripts. Her grandmother had started writing recipes in the journal for Yulia, and then gave it to Yulia to add to. The journal is a place to record, as Yulia called them, “perfect proportions,” like how much flour and water and egg to use to get the right dough consistency.
Even for non-hunting grocery shoppers like me, pelmenis make a great snack or first course. The ideal way to make these would be to invite some friends over, assemble them together like the ol’ villagers used to do, freeze them on a tray, and then store Ziplocs of them in your freezers. Then when someone’s hungry, you just boil water with some salt, a bay leaf and peppercorns, throw the pelmenis in and let them cook for 3-5 minutes after they start floating. Yulia serves hers hot, glistening with cooking broth, a dollop of sour cream or butter melting under a sprinkling of fresh dill. Her son, however, usually complains of the dill, “Why do you always put grass on top?” In summer, Yulia’s mother likes pelmeni with vinegar. In winter, she adds bouillon to the cooking broth and has a bowl of pelmenis in broth. As for me, I think I will be a boiled, butter-and-dill girl. I loved the firm, slippery quality of the nuggets, a texture in my experience only homemade egg-and-flour pasta can achieve.
copyright Lindsay Sterling 2012
