Russian Birch Cream Liqueur

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Whether you want to celebrate the last day of Maslenitsa, Saint Patrick’s Day with a Russian twist, or the coming birch sugar season, this is the drink for you. The Irish-cream-like mixture dilutes the intense flavor of birch syrup, helping to reveal its complexity. This might be my favorite way to consume the syrup, in fact!

Russian Birch Cream LiqueurI originally thought I could take inspiration from Bailey’s, the mother of all cream liqueurs. The main ingredients are well known and advertised, together with the nutrition facts, on their web site. Reproducing the same proportions of sugar (from the birch syrup), fat (from the dairy) and alcohol (from the vodka) should give a similar result, right? Well, not quite. It was a starting point, but the mixture came out way too fatty and boozy. It took me a few rounds to get the balance right, but the result is very enjoyable.

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Restaurant Review: Baku Palace

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A note about my restaurant reviews: New York City counts many Eastern European restaurants scattered across the five boroughs, most of them ignored by restaurant critics and diners alike. I intend to visit as many as I can and report!

Azeri Cuisine - Baku PalaceBaku Palace, in Sheepshead Bay, is one of the very few Azeri restaurants in New York. But if you imagine a hole-in-the-wall serving kebabs with an old Caucasian singer in the corner, you’re in for a surprise. With four restaurant rooms on two floors, the place is quite massive, and covers the better part of a block. It’s also more than a restaurant: like the other big floor show ventures in Brooklyn, it turns into a night club during weekends, and offers catering and private parties.

I’ve been to Baku Palace many times over the years, and this post is long overdue. In fact, I started the review just before Hurricane Sandy last year, and then had to wait until they reopened before I could pay them one more visit. Continue reading →

Latvian Hare Trio

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At long last, my Latvian hare trio is complete! I started this project when I discovered those mysterious recipes for hare cheese. If you run an internet search for hare cheese in English, Russian, or Latvian, you probably won’t find much; for one thing, you won’t see a single picture. This in itself required further investigation.

Because I don’t spend my time dining on wild Scottish hare from D’artagnan, and because my own attempt at hare hunting could easily replace “wild goose chase” in proverbial parlance, it took me a couple of years to reach a point where I was satisfied with my result. Early on, it became clear to me that a whole hare yielded way too much hare cheese, and so I looked for other dishes of Latvian inspiration that could use hare. In particular, I determined that cooking the leg meat in fat ensures that it doesn’t get dry, and hare loin really shouldn’t be cooked more than medium-rare.

Latvian Hare Trio

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Latvian Hare Trio, Part 3: Hare Cheese, Onion Jam, Cornichons

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This curious dish — which has very little to do with actual cheese — was actually what first motivated me to start my Latvian Hare Trio. The final result may look like a traditional pâté, but the preparation is quite different. Lesley Chamberlain’s Food and Cooking of Russia and Pokhlebkin’s Cookbook of the Soviet Peoples both contain fairly similar instructions: take a hare, roast it, braise it, grind it, then cook an omelette, grind it, and mix everything together with mushrooms and butter before baking in a dish, optionally wrapped in pastry.

I found that the result of this procedure had an unpleasantly dry mouthfeel, so I made several changes to improve it. In particular, cooking the leg meat as a confit was a big improvement, and it made little sense to use the precious hare loins. I also got rid of the bizarre ground omelette and used raw eggs to bind the forcemeat like a normal person. Finally, the onion jam and cornichons bring welcome touches of sweetness and acidity.

Latvian Hare Cheese

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Latvian Hare Trio, Part 2: Leg Confit, Potato Pancakes, Sauerkraut

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After last week’s hare loin, this post features the hare legs with another group of typical Latvian winter flavors: potato, sauerkraut, and animal fat. The recipe is pretty short, because most of the work has been done during the hare preparation.

The only non-trivial element left is the potato pancakes. I’ve already talked about deruny here, but I’m taking a different approach today, simply slicing the potatoes and relying on the starch and salt to bind them all together.

Finally, if you want to make the dish a little bit healthier but still recognizably Latvian, you could prepare a wine reduction to drizzle on the meat, instead of the fat!

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Latvian Hare Trio, Part 1: Sautéed Loin, Blackcurrant Balsam, Barley

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Black Balsam is a traditional Latvian herbal liqueur. Its recipe, created by a pharmacist living in Riga, is based on a composition of 24 different plants, flowers, buds, juices, roots, oils, and berries prepared in oak barrels. The drink itself is black and very bitter, but with a distinct sweetness to it. Admirers of chartreuse and the early novels of Poppy Z. Brite will love it. Others, maybe not so much.

Legend has it that Catherine the Great became ill during a visit to Latvia and was cured after drinking Black Balsam — one sure has to hope that such a harsh-tasting beverage has some medicinal virtues to justify consuming it. Nowadays, however, a smoother version is available, mixed with blackcurrant juice. If you have trouble finding it in the US, try mixing regular black balsam (check availability here) with crème de cassis instead.

Latvian Hare - Sautéed Loin, Blackcurrant Balzam, Barley

What does this all have to do with today’s recipe, you might ask. Well, balsam and hare have more in common than it seems: they’re both consumed in Latvia, and both can be acquired tastes. Because Latvian cuisine gravitates around a somewhat limited number of ingredients, it made sense to me to try to pair them together — and I think the association works quite well. Barley, another staple of the region, was a natural accompaniment.

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Hare Preparation: Loin Medallion And Leg Confit

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Of all game meats, hare is one of the most full-flavored, and one of the most vilified. After all, not only are you eating a rodent, but the critter’s constant running suggests a tough hunt and even tougher meat. To make matters worse, nothing screams dead animal nearly as loud as hung hare meat (at least among the meats available for sale); the smell and taste really need to be acquired.

In New York State, you’re allowed to hunt hares, but not to trap them. As a beginner, my first hunting attempt was totally hopeless, even with the help of a guide and a couple of pointer dogs. Whether you entertain the foolish idea of catching your own wild bunny, or you prefer to let professionals do the hard work and you purchase it (e.g. from D’Artagnan if you live in the US), hare remains a rare and expensive treat. You’ll want to prepare it right. And even if you’re a game lover, you might want to take the gaminess down a notch.

Stamp from Czechoslovakia - 1966

This post will explain how to prepare hare in two different ways, which you can use as the bases for your own recipes (I’ll give you my own Eastern European version in the coming weeks, of course). The wine marinade may not really tenderize the meat as was once believed, but it certainly makes the hare flavor more… accessible. The transglutaminased loins yield two superb medallions to enjoy lightly seared, and the slow-cooked leg confit prevents the meat from getting dry or tough. Both could taste pretty good with a wine reduction.

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Kutab, Azerbaijani Stuffed Flatbread

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Kutabs are among the most popular Azeri dishes, together with plov, dolma, and of course kebabs (kebabs being a distant first: virtually the only meal you’ll ever eat in a restaurant outside of Baku). A kutab — not to be confused with kutap — is essentially a lavash filled with savory stuffing while still raw, then folded in half and pan-fried. It is often served with a sprinkling of sumac on top, a red spice which imparts a lemony note.

Baku - Mugam Club Restaurant

Classic lamb kutab, as served at Mugam Club in Baku

The most common kutab fillings are ground lamb and greens, with the occasional cheese or winter squash, but you can pretty much do whatever you want, as long as the layer of stuffing remains quite thin. In addition to the four above-mentioned classics, all of which I’m presenting here with some personal tweaks, I’ve also created two new “signature” kutabs.

My first new kutab uses foie gras and pomegranate in a nod to all the Brooklyn restaurants that feature the fattened duck liver on their menus for no apparent reason other than it’s expensive and French. Baku Palace serves kutabs and foie gras as separate dishes, so why not put them together?

The second contains actual duck meat. I recently posted a duck breast kebab, and now you can use the legs (and the wings if you’d like) to make a kutab. Then you’ve got the whole bird turned into an Azeri dinner for 4!

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Berlin Restaurant Report: Pasternak

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In addition to my New York restaurant reviews, I’d like to share with you my thoughts on random Eastern European restaurants I visit during my various trips. These posts may not always have the depth of my traditional reviews, so I won’t provide any ratings. I’m also unlikely to write about a place if it’s not noteworthy in some capacity.

Named after famous Russian writer Boris Pasternak, Restaurant Pasternak is located in the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood of Berlin. From my limited understanding of the city’s geography, this area of former-East Berlin is now famous for its designer stores, restaurants, cafés, and bars, and has become popular among American expats and European immigrants.

Berlin - Restaurant Pasternak

As if the name wasn’t enough (the Russian author wrote Doctor Zhivago and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, for Stalin’s sake!), the menu makes it clear that Restaurant Pasternak is trying to seduce a western crowd. Dishes are named after intelligentsia, proletariat, former Soviet cities, regions, or republics, and of course, the good Doctor himself. The only thing missing is a picture of Omar Sharif on the wall. What you get instead is a collection of Soviet-inspired postcards like the one below. All in all, the selection is (luckily) much shorter than Pasternak’s novel, with a number of Russian classics delivered in multiple versions, plus a small selection of Jewish specialties such as latkes and kreplach.

Berlin - Restaurant Pasternak

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Seared Chops and Braised Shanks of Venison in Bautzen Sour Cherry Mustard Sauce with Perfect Fries

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This recipe combines some rather eclectic culinary impressions from my recent trip to Eastern Germany: the sour-cherry mustard from Bautzen, Erich Honecker and his passion for hunting, the mulled wine of the Christmas markets, and potatoes in various forms — from rubbery dumplings to the fries served with currywurst. Let’s talk a bit more about each of them…

Bautzen Mustard

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