Cooking with George: Palacsinta

The other night my husband George and I took the time to cook together, which I have to say is one of my favorite things to do.

This is George!

George!

We created a fusion dish of our own invention, Hungarian palacsinta with a Lebanese style filling. Woo hoo!

He made the palacsinta, which is essentially a Hungarian version of a Crepe (although it seems that etymologically speaking, the palascinta came before the crepe, but I’m getting off track). The only difference I can pinpoint off hand is that the Hungarian style is more rustic than the French version, but that may merely come down to technique. The French recommend a flat or even slightly domed steel pan, and sometimes a specialized spatula to create the perfectly thin and perfectly round crepe. George’s grandma used a cast iron skillet, and that’s what George did. Not perfectly round, not paper thin, beautifully browned and perfectly delicious.

Anyway, George posted photos of our cooking adventure on his blog focusing on the palacsinta because that part was his job.

http://blog.vec.com/2010/04/30/hungarian-crepes-palacsinta/

He put me in charge of the filling. I remembered that I had about a half pound of ground beef in the freezer. I had parsley in the yard that somehow managed to survive a) our giant garden bunny, and b) our horrendous winter. I had garlic, onion, a lemon, some raw pine nuts leftover from a previous cooking adventure…hey Lebanese food!  I Googled around for “Lebanese Ground Beef” and found a starting point with this recipe,http://mideastfood.about.com/od/beef/r/basickofta.htm, and then fished around www.lebguide.com to see what other options were out there with regard to preparation and seasoning. Here is what I did:

PREP WORK

  • Carefully thawed the ground beef in the microwave. I kept an eye on it on the defrost mode to make sure it lost frost, but stayed raw. I placed it in a small metal mixing bowl and set it aside.
  • Plucked about a handful of parsley from the garden. Pulled off the leaves and chopped it fine. I wasn’t perfect about separating the stems from the leaves because that would take far too long. I just made sure I took of the bigger stem bits. I ended up with about ¼ cup of finished product.
  • I took a generous handful of raw pine nuts and spread them on the little baking sheet that goes with my toaster oven, lined with foil. I put the nuts in the toaster oven and set it to broil. This is above my chopping surface, so it allowed me to watch them carefully. Pine nuts go from raw to char in no time.
  • Diced a quarter of a medium to large yellow onion. That yielded about 1/3 cup.
  • Removed the pine nuts from the toaster oven and set aside.
  • Added the onion and parsley to the bowl, then one large clove of garlic, a couple turns of fresh ground black pepper, a pinch of Kosher salt, and probably no more than 1/8 teaspoon of allspice. (Allspice popped up quite a bit in the various Lebanese recipes I browsed). I then mixed it all together with my hands until the ingredients were just evenly incorporated into the meat.

COOKING

  • Took out my trusty All-Clad 10” frying pan, and added enough olive oil so that when it’s hot and I swirl the pan, the bottom is covered. Put the heat at medium high and waited for the oil to become fragrant and shimmer a little bit, but not smoke.
  • Added the ground beef mixture and immediately began to mix it around until the meat was nicely browned. I kept it moving because I didn’t want to burn the parsley and garlic. In hind sight, I realize I technically should have put the parsley in at the last minute, but the curly variety I had was very hardy, and stood up well to the heat. I think flat Italian parsley would have burned or cooked away in this case.
  • Suddenly I realized I hadn’t added any heat! Tossed in a nice healthy pinch of dried pepper flakes and gave them time to warm up and mingle into the rest of the food.
  • I thought it looked a little dry, so I mixed in a teaspoon of the Greek yogurt I bought for the sauce (details below). This was just enough to make it a little bit sticky, but not so much that you are building a sauce. I didn’t want to mute the flavors of all of the seasoning I had prepared.
  • Removed the pan from the heat and tossed in the pine nuts, and set aside while George started the palacsinta.

THE SAUCE

When browsing the Lebanese recipes, I noticed that many of them called for yogurt for dipping. They usually specified Lebanese yogurt. At the grocery store I only came across the standard, and Greek. Greek cooking has a lot of similarities to Middle Eastern fare (parsley, olive, woody spices, flat breads, etc.) so I grabbed it! I bought an individual serving cup, which ended up being my prep bowl.

The yogurt tasted more like a very tart sour cream than your average Yoplait, and it was very thick. I decided I needed to mirror the flavors in the beef.

  • With my trusty garlic press, I crushed one large clove of garlic directly into the cup of yogurt. Mixed it up and gave it a taste. So far so good.
  • Added a very small pinch of Kosher salt and a turn of fresh ground black pepper, and took another taste.
  • Took a quarter of a lemon and squeezed just a little bit of juice in, stirred & tasted. Surprisingly, the lemon somehow made it taste more like yogurt than sour cream.

Then I set it aside to help George take photos of his palacsinta cooking. I wanted to let the sauce sit for a bit to let the flavors mingle.

Tasted again…should I ad allspice? Naw…more lemon…taste, tiny bit more salt, taste…bingo!

This mirrored the flavors in the meat without overpowering anything or being redundant. By this point it was about room temperature, which I think worked quite well. Because of the lemon juice and all of my stirring, the texture also changed from a thick sour cream consistency, to a smoother, flowing yogurt consistency.

ASSEMBLY

  • George kept the palacsinta in an oven on very low heat. I grabbed my pan of filling, and tossed it around on a burner to warm it up.
  • Laid out one palacsinta, and put about 2 tablespoons worth of the filling in a line down the center. You don’t want to overstuff.
  • Assemble like you would an enchilada…flop the left side of the palacsinta over the meat, then continue rolling the whole thing over to the right.
  • With a teaspoon, take some of the sauce and drizzle over the top. YUM!!!!

xo
en

This entry was posted in Adventures in Food and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.