Syrniki

Ingredients

• Curd cheese, 5-9% fat — dry, drained500 g
• Egg1
• Plain flour — plus a little for your hands3 tbsp
• Sugar1 tbsp
• Vanilla sugar1 tsp
• Salt1 pinch
• Butter for frying30 g
• Sour cream and jamto taste

Salt and spices grow more slowly than the rest: doubling a dish does not double the pepper.

Weight converts to ounces and volume to cups. Grams of flour are not turned into cups, because that depends on how tightly it is packed.

Method

1. 1

   Push the curd through a sieve or blitz it. Grainy curd makes grainy syrniki; this step is not optional.

   5 min

2. 2

   Work in the egg, sugar, vanilla and salt, then the flour. The mixture stays sticky; that is correct.

   3 min

3. 3

   With wet or lightly floured hands shape discs about a centimetre and a half thick. Thicker and the middle stays raw, thinner and they dry out.

   7 min

4. 4

   Fry over medium heat with a lid on, three or four minutes a side. The lid matters more than the butter: it steams the middle through.

   8 min

About the dish

The great mistake with syrniki is flour. It goes in until the mixture is comfortable to handle, and at that moment the fritters are already ruined: they come out as flatbreads. The right mixture is sticky and awkward, but what is inside is curd rather than bread.

The second is wet curd. Hang it in muslin for an hour if it is loose, or you will end up adding flour anyway. Curd at 5 to 9 per cent fat gives a far better result than a skimmed one.

Keep the sugar in the batter to a minimum. It melts in the pan, so they scorch outside while staying raw inside; the sweetness is better added on top.

Worth knowing

• — If the mixture will not hold at all, add a spoon of semolina and let it stand ten minutes — it binds the moisture better than flour without making them dense.
• — The pan should not be screaming hot. On a high flame a crust forms in a minute and the curd inside stays cold.
• — Raisins go into the mixture rather than on top, and soak them first: dry ones pull moisture out of the curd.

Nutrition

Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.

Calories

340 kcal

Protein

22 g

Fat

16 g

Carbs

26 g

More from Russia

• Borscht — A beetroot soup on beef stock where acid holds both the colour and the flavour. The beetroot is braised separately, never boiled in the pot.