There is usually a lot of talk about the fact that a lean table does not have to be meager and boring, but not everyone and not always succeed in proving this by deed (and dish). We asked Vlad Piskunov, the chef of the Russian cuisine restaurant "Matryoshka", to help in this difficult matter. He told what kind of meatless dishes were traditionally prepared in Russia, and how they can be interestingly and easily adapted to a modern home menu.
Valaam cabbage soup
On days of strict fasting, when it is not even allowed to eat fish, Russian Orthodox people prepare mushroom cabbage soup - depending on the season: from fresh, dried and salted mushrooms. Recently, more and more often such cabbage soup began to be called Valaam. The combination of sauerkraut welding and dried porcini mushrooms decoction is one of the most harmonious in nature. Try it!
Ingredients
70 g dry porcini mushrooms
500 g sauerkraut with carrots
1 onion
2 cloves of garlic
2 tbsp. l. vegetable oil
2 tbsp. l. rye flour
1/2 bay leaf
1/2 tbsp. l. Dried Dill
Salt
Preparation
Put the cabbage sauerkraut with grated carrots in the iron pot. Fill with water, salt and set without a lid in the oven or on low heat for about 2-3 hours to weld. If the water boils away, and the cabbage is still not soft enough, you need to add boiling water. As a result, we should get a fully cooked cabbage with a minimum amount of liquid (the cabbage processed in this way - "welding" - becomes soft, and the excess acid leaves).
We sort out the mushrooms and soak them in cold water for 10-15 minutes (no longer). Drain and transfer to a saucepan. Fill with cold water, salt and set over medium heat. Cook for about 20 minutes. We discard the mushrooms in a colander and pour the broth into a bowl. Squeeze the mushrooms slightly. Strain the broth through cheesecloth or linen so that the sand, which is often found in dried mushrooms, does not get into the soup. Pour the mushroom broth into a cast iron pot with cabbage.
Finely chop the mushrooms. Cut the onion into small cubes and sauté in vegetable oil in a frying pan. Add chopped mushrooms and continue to fry on medium heat until they become noticeably darker. If you want to get cabbage soup that tastes as much as possible to those that our ancestors ate in ancient times, then you can skip the sautéing of onions and frying of mushrooms ─ in this case, the onions should be laid even at the stage of boiling the cabbage. We transfer the fried mushrooms to the iron pot. Add bay leaf, dried dill, flour diluted in broth, finely chopped garlic. We put the cast iron in the oven or oven (120–150C) for a couple of hours.
Serve cabbage soup with crumbly buckwheat or barley porridge. If you let the cabbage soup steep in a cool place for a day, they will only benefit from this.
Traditional vinaigrette
Of course, everyone ate and everyone knows how to make a vinaigrette - this is one of the simplest and most popular Russian salads. He crumbled boiled vegetables and pickles, filled with oil ─ and on the table. But it was not always so. Vinaigrette (just as a salad, and not as a classic French dressing) has been known in Russia since the 18th century, and was a mixture of completely different cut products, including boiled fish, veal, and poultry. Now, of all these "non-vegetable" ingredients, there is a herring or other salted fish. We advise you to try to make a vinaigrette from vegetables baked in ash and have gained a haze aroma, and season with a classic sauce of the same name ("vinaigrette"), where mustard always goes. Whether or not to add salted fish is up to you. And one more thing: your salad will only benefit if you add some salted milk mushrooms or mushrooms to it.
Ingredients
2 beets
3 potatoes
3 carrots
1 onion
200 g fresh or frozen green peas
3 pickled or pickled cucumbers
3-4 sprigs of dill
70 ml vegetable oil
2 tbsp. l. apple cider vinegar
1 tbsp. l. lemon juice
1 tbsp. l. sugar
1 tsp Mustard
Salt
Preparation
Wash the beets and carrots thoroughly and wrap them in foil. We prick with a fork and put on hot coals in the oven or grill. Bake until tender, which we determine by piercing the vegetables with a knife or bamboo skewer. Boil the potatoes in their uniforms. As carrots and beets will be pierced freely with a knife, we take them out, unfold the foil and put vegetables on the wire rack without it so that they are saturated with the aroma of a fire. We are waiting for another 10 minutes (it's not scary if the skin burns, we will still remove it).
We put green peas (or as it was called before the pod) in boiling salted water, wait for it to boil again and discard it on a sieve. We douse with cold water. We take out the baked vegetables, cool to room temperature. We clean the cooled beets, carrots and potatoes, and also peel the onions.
Cut the root vegetables and pickles into cubes. Cut the onion very thinly. Chop the dill finely. In a large bowl, combine all vegetables except beets. Pour the chopped beets separately with a couple of tablespoons of vegetable oil and stir ─ this is necessary so that it does not “get dirty”.
Making a gas station. In a cup or bowl, mix the vinegar and lemon juice. Add salt, sugar, mustard and mix thoroughly until completely dissolved. Add vegetable oil little by little and beat into a homogeneous emulsion. Pour the dressing into the vinaigrette, mix, then put the beets and gently mix again. We serve to the table.
Provencal salad (to replace the vinaigrette)
For those for whom the traditional vinaigrette is a simple and boring dish, we recommend making this salad. It has not the slightest relation to Provence, but is our Russian invention. The name "Provencal" salad, most likely, got because it is dressed with olive oil, that is, Provencal oil. In addition to apples and lingonberries, you can put other pickled or pickled fruits in this salad: grapes, plums, pears. You can add a little and small pitted raisins.
Ingredients
400 g of cabbage sauerkraut with trit
1–2 apples (Antonovka)
50 g of urinated lingonberry
50 ml of lingonberry water
1 small stick of cinnamon
2 cloves
2 allspice peas
1 tbsp. l. sugar
Olive oil
Salt
Preparation
Drain the brine from the sauerkraut through a colander into an enamel pan, squeeze it slightly. Add lingonberry water. Put a small stick of cinnamon, a couple of check nails, allspice, sugar. Boil for a few minutes, let it cool slowly. We filter through the gauze folded in half. Add olive oil and stir. While we make this dressing, cabbage and apples should be in the refrigerator.
Cut the apples into eight pieces, cut out the core. Put the cabbage in a salad bowl. Add apple slices and lingonberry to the cabbage. Mix gently with two large spoons. Pour with a dressing of cabbage brine and olive oil.
Sugudai (lightly salted fish)
Malosol or, as it is more often said in Siberia, sugadai (there is also the name sugudai) is prepared from wild fish caught in the lower reaches of the Lena, Ob, Yenisei, Kolyma, Indigirka and deep-frozen. Parasites that are found in wild fish die at the same time, and freezing does not affect the quality of the dish. On the contrary, the so-called “chilled” fish from remote regions on the shelves should be highly suspicious. Therefore, for the dish we buy Kamchatka chinook salmon, Taimyr boil or Yakut nelma in shops specializing in northern fish and cook sugudai. We are looking at a "rich" restaurant version of this uncomplicated dish. Usually, lightly salted is prepared from only one type of fish. If the fish is small, like vendace, for example, then they do not even remove the skin with it and do not worry too much about small bones.
Ingredients
330 g fillet of chinook salmon, coho salmon or sockeye
330 g fillet of nelma or chir
330 g muksun or whitefish
11 onion
3 cloves of garlic
1/2 lemon
2 tbsp. l. refined vegetable oil
1 tbsp. l. salt
Freshly ground black pepper
Preparation
Cut the fish without bones and skin into two-centimeter pieces. Peel the onion, cut it into half rings, and cut the garlic into thin foals. Sprinkle the onion and garlic with salt and squeeze the juice from half a lemon. We wrinkle our hands properly so that the juice comes out (it is best to do this with disposable gloves). Add fish, sprinkle with pepper, add oil and mix well with your hands.
After half an hour, the salted salt can be considered ready, you just need to select and remove all the onions and garlic and can be served as a delicious snack. In the "folk" version, the onion remains and is an integral part of the food. By the way, if you leave the fish to marinate for 10-12 hours, it will acquire a completely different taste, and the dish itself will have a different meaning. Try both.
All of the above dishes, before cooking at home (or after, to compare), can be tried in the Russian cuisine restaurant "Matryoshka" (part of the Maison Dellos group): Moscow, Kutuzovskiy prospect, 2 / 1s6, tel. +7 (495) 241-86-31
Photo: archives of press services
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