March 12, 2018
It's not time for potica yet, that will be around April 1st, when Lent ends and festive food enters the dining rooms again, so we might as well save more complex recipes for later.
Cottage cheese filling, usually combined with chopped tarragon, is a common (sweet) filling for some very popular versions of potica, and even more common with štruklji. The filling in the case of the first dish is rolled in fermented dough and baked, while in the latter it’s rolled in pulled dough and cooked or steamed while wrapped in a piece of cloth.
The simplest and hence most popular way of consuming the cottage cheese filling is putting it in rolled pancakes, which are then placed into a baking pan, coated with slightly salted egg and cream mixture, baked in the oven and cut like a cake when cooled down a little, similar to a pancake mille feuille.
In the book Grandma’s Kitchen we read that the “creation of this dish has probably been aided by abundance of high quality cottage cheese available at the Ljubljana Food Market. Usually prepared during the fresh tarragon season, it was often accompanied with kidney bean soup, or served as a main course on Fridays.”
Grandma’s Kitchen: Recipes from Slovenia, Government Communications Office of the Republic of Slovenia, Ljubljana, 2017
We don’t have any tarragon, but we do have abundance of cottage cheese, eggs and a slightly bored and hungry teenager, who is, in fact, quite an expert in pancake making. So this is where we got the recipe from, and a bit later, the pancakes as well:
Ingredients for 15 thin pancakes (eight of which managed to reach the oven before being eaten during the preparatory stage of this dish):
5 eggs
700ml milk
450ml flour
150 ml fresh cream
25 ml sugar
pinch of salt
Filling: eventually we decided not to add cream cheese (ABC on the right side of the picture) to the mixture, as we already had enough filling with the rest of the ingredients
Filling:
500g cottage cheese
1 cup sour cream
3 eggs
3-5 tbsp. sugar
1 vanilla sugar
salt
1 bunch of fresh tarragon (if you have it)
Coating ingredients: eggs, cream, a pinch of salt
Coating
1 cup sour cream (fresh cream will do as well)
3 eggs
pinch of salt
Place in oven and bake at 180 degrees Celsius for about 20 minutes.
Here is another, similar version of the recipe, with tarragon.
Dober tek!
