Blintzes!
Blintzes are these fantastic little thinner-than-crepe pancakes, filled with good stuff (sweet or savoury) and rolled up. They can be served warm, cold or at room temperature - depending on the filling. Blintzes filled with a sweet cheese filling have become a traditional holiday food in Israel for Shavuot. For the cold ones, you'll need to use a specialty cheese that cannot be found in (most of) North America (I am pretty sure you will be able to find "Gevinah Levanah in Brooklin LOL!). So I am going to offer here only the recipe for the baked cheese blintzes, which my dearest grandmother Ruth gave me. They are absolutely divine!
For the Blintzes:
3 eggs
1 cup milk
2 Tbs. vegetable oil of your choice (preferably non-GMO, such as organic grapeseed oil)
3/4 cup unbleached wheat flour
salt to taste (no more than 1/2 tsp.)
Butter for greasing the pan
Mix together all the ingredients in the above order
Pour 2 Tbs. at a time on a hot girdle or pan (greased with melted butter)
Smooth and spread around (like you do with crepes) to form a round, pretty form
Fry only on one side, and once finished, set aside on a plate, stacked with their fried side up, until ready to fill them all.
For the filling:
2 cups soft, unripened cheese (such as ricotta or quark cheese, or cottage cheese; if you like this to be more creamy and smooth and less crumbly, you can substitute some cream cheese or sour cream for part of the cheese - but no more than 1/2 cup, otherwise it may be too runny!)
1 egg yolk
2 Tbs. sugar
1 Tbs. lemon juice
1 tsp. pure vanilla extract
Grated lemon peel of 1 lemon
Raisins (optional)
* Additional sugar and cinnamon for sprinkling on the top (Optional)
Preheat the oven to 180 celsius.
Fill the Blintzes with one Tbs. of the filling, roll and close from both ends. Layer on a butter-greased pan, and sprinkle with a bit of cinnamon and sugar (if desired).
Bake for 15 minutes or until golden and the sugar has melted.
Serve warm (not hot!) or at room temperature. These are perfect on their own, but will happily lend themselves to a garnish of strawberry or other fruit or even Creme Fraiche or ice cream on the side. But these will be completely unnecessary because these Blintzes truly are perfect the way they are!
Labels: Blintzes, Cheese Recipes, Lemon, Recipes, Shavuot, Vanilla
posted by Ayala Moriel @ 8:46:00 PM
3 Comments:
OH man, I love blintzes. Sadly, they do not love me back. (Dairy and I do not mix well in any great quantity, sadly.) Love having fresh marrionberries poured over them best of all. I've never actually tasted them as a savory dish: only as a sweet, fruit-laden treat. That would be such a fun cooking experiment to try! What sort of savory ingredients would one use? I keep thinking of meaty things, but that strikes me as incorrect somehow? (Plus, being a veg, meat's not so appealing, hee!) My Grandmother used to serve them with a kind of roughly diced baked apple and cinnamon topping, which was *divine*
Katie,
I love your new portrait!
How unfortunate that you can't eat the cheese filled ones... They are the best :(
But the blintzes themselves also have milk (I guess you can substituted with soymilk though).
Applesauce and cooked apples are wonderful as a filling. You can also fill them with freshly sliced strawberries, a simple jam or any fruit filling really... Probably good with anything you use in crepes too, from chestnut cream to nutella...
I'm a vegetarian too (since I was born), so meet is out of the question and I won't even mention it ;)
Savoury (vegetarian) fillings I've seen were mushrooms and other savoury cheese fillings (I know that's not much help!).
It's basically a Hungarian food specialty (they really call it "palacsinta" and not blintzes, by the way!) and I am sure you could find many recipes for those in a Hungarian cookbook (though I can't recommend any specific one myself). But I think it's also spread through the Balkan and Eastern Europe, probably with a different name in every place they are made...
I do eat the cheese filled ones, but like, only every once in a blue moon! It's... well, to be polite, painful for me and those around me. And unpleasantly smelly. Heh. Lactose is the bane of my existence. It kills me, because I love dairy. Too much so for my own good, frankly. Thanks for the ideas. Nutella sounds like a drool-inducing idea, and I am suddely seized with the idea of nutella blintzes with Mexican fried bananas and/or plantains on top! But the savory style ones I'll have to investigate. I have a lot of German blintz recipes from German friends (weirdly, though, none from my actual German relatives, which probably is because they were all German-from-Russia which is a whole 'nother cultural influence no matter if the Germans-from-Russia are Mennonite, Catholic, Lutheran, or Jewish!) but they all include the sweet ingredients. Didn't know that folks besides Germans and Jewish people ate them - this is a good avenue of exploration, thank you.
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