Slovenian cuisine
Potica
A yeasted roll with a walnut filling, coiled into a ring. Slovenian baking for every celebration.
- Prep
- 90 min
- Cook
- 60 min
- Total
- 150 min
- Difficulty
- Takes practice
Ingredients
- Flour700 g
- Milk — warm300 ml
- Dry yeast10 g
- Butter150 g
- Egg yolks4
- Sugar120 g
- Walnuts — ground600 g
- Cream200 ml
- Honey3 tbsp
- Rum2 tbsp
- Cinnamon1 tsp
- Lemon zest1
- Salt1 tsp
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
Dissolve the yeast in the warm milk with a spoon of sugar and leave it ten minutes, until it foams.
12 min
- 2
Knead a dough from the flour, the yeast mixture, yolks, sugar, softened butter, zest and salt. Work it fifteen minutes.
18 min
- 3
Leave it somewhere warm for an hour and twenty, until it has doubled.
82 min
- 4
Warm the cream with the honey, pour it over the ground walnuts, add the rum and cinnamon and cool it to lukewarm.
15 min
- 5
Roll the dough into a rectangle three millimetres thick and spread the filling, leaving two centimetres clear at the edges.
20 min
- 6
Roll it up tightly from the long side, lay it in a ring tin seam down and let it prove forty minutes.
45 min
- 7
Prick the roll in several places with a skewer and bake at 170 °C for an hour, to a deep gold.
62 min
About the dish
The dough is rolled to two or three millimetres, thin enough to see through. Thick dough gives few turns, and it is the number of layers in a slice that potica is judged by.
The filling is spread warm but not hot: hot filling melts the butter in the dough and the roll slides apart as it is coiled.
It is baked in a ring tin with a funnel in the middle. That is not for appearance: without it the centre stays raw while the edges are already burning.
Worth knowing
- — The holes matter: steam from the filling has to escape, or the dough puffs and separates from the nut layer.
- — Grind the walnuts immediately before filling. Ground ahead, they release oil and turn bitter.
- — Potica is cut only when completely cold, ideally the next day. Warm, it crumbles and the layers do not show.
Nutrition
Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.
- Calories
- 560 kcal
- Protein
- 12 g
- Fat
- 32 g
- Carbs
- 58 g
More from Slovenia
- Jota — A thick soup of soured turnip or sauerkraut with beans, potato and smoked meat.