Today was Ukrainian Christmas Eve, and I spent it watching the re-run of the world juniors final and making feta bacon perogies. Yes, feta is Greek, but I have so much of it I had to take the chance to use some up. And no, Ukrainians don't eat meat on Christmas Eve, but I also have a whole slab of slightly over-salted bacon. Deal with it.I tried a new dough recipe this time around, one gleaned from Michael Symon's restaurant Lola, as documented by Michael Ruhlman in Soul of a Chef. It goes like this:
- 3 cups sour cream
- 3/4 lbs butter
- 6 eggs
- 12 cups flour
- 24oz sour cream
- 12oz butter
- 12oz eggs
- 60oz flour
Besides feta and bacon, I also have homemade red wine in unholyabundance. A small part of the perogies are stuffed with potatoes that have been simmered in red wine. This was one of those experiments I knew would turn out either really well or really poorly. Ends up there's a reason that potatoes are never cooked in wine: acid makes fiber rigid and inhibits the gelatinization of starch. While the potatoes did cook, a hard skin formed on the outside of each piece. The food mill managed to separate these hard parts of potato and extrude a nice potato purée.
I thought the purée tasted amazing, the cooked wine adding a bit of tartness to contrast salty cheese and bacon. Plus it was purple, which is cool, although the symbolism is more appropriate for Easter than Christmas.
Despite my enthusiasm, the red wine-bacon-feta perogies received mixed reviews.
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