Modern Romanian cuisine (3) - My ''Mamaliga''

Romania isn't best known for its food but it will be....I know. There is an incredibly rich culinary tradition here, homegrown in Romania, born out of the necessities of life, brought in by the Ottomans, Germans, Russians, Serbians, Hungarians.... Add to that a generous climate, fertile soil and the Black See that provide fabulous ingredients in abundance and you are ready to feast.
To understand Romania and to understand mămăliga, you have to understand traditional Romanian culture.
Historically, Romanians ate this golden bread (mămăliga - made from cornmeal) as a replacement to bread. It is inexpensive, easy to do every day, in every season and could be found in every house.
Mămăliga is similar to a porridge made out of wheat of cornmeal traditional for Romania. It is better known to the rest of the world in its Italian form named polenta.
Traditionally, mămăliga is cooked by boiling water, salt and cornmeal in a special-shaped cast iron pot called ''ceaun'' or ''tuci''.
Mămăliga is much thicker than the regular Italian polenta to the point that it can be cut in slices with a string, like bread.
Sometimes, mămăliga can be much softer, almost to the consistency of porridge.
Mămăliga is a fat-free, cholesterol-free, high-fiber food. It can be used as a healthy alternative to more refined carbohydrates such as white bread, white pasta or white rice.
In Romania, mămăliga is used as a bread substitute and can be served all day:
-with sour cream and jam for breakfast,
-stuffed with cheese and served with pickles as a all day meal
- used as the starchy base for meaty stews, grills, Sarmale recipe here….etc, at dinner.

Today I will introduce you to mămăliga, not in a traditional way of preparation, to demonstrate how versatile and deeply satisfying this peasant dish can be.Parmesan and Rosemary Polenta with Wild Boar Stew
Mamaliga cu rosmarin si parmesan servita cu tocanita de porc mistret
Serves 6 to 8
Rosemary Polenta
Ingredients150 gr of polenta
400 ml of chicken or vegetable stock
400 ml of water
100 gr of grated Parmesan cheese
fresh rosemary, chopped
olive oil
salt
Preparation
In a cast iron pot ''ceaun'' or ''tuci',' or a pot, add the water and stock to boil.
After water is boiling, reduce heat to the lowest possible setting.
Add salt and rosemary. Gradually stir in polenta; cook, stirring the mixture constantly, for 3 to 5 minutes or until polenta thickens and pulls away from sides of pot.
Stir in Parmesan and olive oil. Once it begins to stick to the side of your pot, before collapsing back into the mix, the mamaliga is done.
To prepare stew
Ingredients:
5 tablespoons olive oil
2 large onion chopped
1 kg boneless wild boar meat, cubed 1-2cm
1 tbs white flour
1/2 bottle of red wine
400 ml beef stock
400 gr canned chopped tomatoes
3 bay leaves from real spice
5 cloves garlic, crushed
1 dried chili peppers crushed from real spice
1 cinnamon stick from real spice
250 gr carrots chopped
250 gr celery sticks chopped
100 gr dry prunes
6 sun-dried tomatoes
fresh thyme chopped
fresh rosemary, chopped
salt and black pepper to taste
Directions:
To prepare stew, in a large cast-iron pot, saute the onion in olive oil until translucent.
Add and cook the meat over high heat, turning frequently, just until it's cooked on the outside. Add the flour and mix to incorporate. Add the wine and beef stock. Add the canned tomatoes and the bay leaves.
Gradually add the garlic, dried chili, cinnamon stick, sun-dried tomatoes, carrots, celery, prunes, herbs, and salt and black pepper to taste.
Simmer on low and stir occasionally for at least two hours or longer if possible.
The stew is ready to eat when the meat has totally fallen apart and most of the liquid has been absorbed by the meat.

Take out the cinnamon stick and bay leaves before serving.

Serve over the polenta or with pasta and top with grated cheese or parmesan bisquit.
Accompany with a full bodied red wine, and enjoy with good company.
Here you can find mamaliga not in a traditional way of preparation.
With Tiger Prawns and avocado salsa.

 ''Mamaliga'' with scalops and salmon rulade.

 ''Mamaliga'' with cod wraped in parma ham and lobster bisque.

 Black ''mamaliga '' with squid ink served with Tiger prawns.

 Red ''mamaliga'' with venison filet, goats cheese, red onions marmalade and thyme sauce.

 Filet of lamb with feta and aubergines roulade served with goats milk ''mamaliga'' and olive puree.

''Mamaliga'' stufed with goats cheese and served with fresh tomato sauce and catalan herbs olive oil.
Enjoy! Pin It Now!

Modern Romanian cuisine (2)

Soups (ciorba or zeama - argot). In fact, in Romania, soup (supă) means something else; it's a homemade clear vegetable and meat broth where we add very thin homemade pasta (more like noodles) or semolina dumplings. But we can not translate ''ciorba'' in English, other then soup.''Zeama'' or ''ciorba'' is the way we call the soup In Romania and we use to eat a lot of them. We have a wide range of soups( zeama or ciorba) that are made with or without meat, or made with fish and they are offered on all menus in Romanian restaurants.Fresh ingredients are the basics to really tasty Romanian soups. As the climate and landscape changes thoughout Romania, regional favourites depend on what is available around the seasons.These can be made from meat and vegetable, beef tripe, pork foot or fish soups and all this can be soured with traditionally borş (fermented wheat bran), lemon juice, sauerkraut juice or vinegar.
Many of this traditional soups recipes use a lot of pork fat and the cooking time for this recipes are long...way to long. By cooking the vegetables to long we destroy not only the bad bacteria but we destroy the good things too. So here in my new modern Romanian recipes I will try to aproach them a bit different and try to save some vitamins beside a new presentation.
Recipes don't always have to be exact, try improvising to make traditional dishes not too traditional...try to make them in the way you like and try to use the fresh ingredients that you already have.
With the wide range of fabulous organic ingredients that exist in Romania today, you can be inspired to make fantastic soups. Organic ingredients enhance taste, and make recipes healthier for you and your family. Number one secret for a good soup is to make a good stock.Stock is most important in making soups because it has flavor, and it carries flavor in soups. Stock is the thin liquid produced by simmering raw ingredients. Then solids are removed, leaving a thin, highly-flavoured liquid. The stock can be made from any meat like... beef, veal, chicken, fish or vegetables. Soup stocks are best made with bone-in meat to slowly release the flavor carrier (collagen) from the bones. By slowly heating it, the collagen dissolves and brings out the flavor from the bones, and picks up the flavors of the aromatic vegetables. In this way stocks have flavours.
''Collagen - a flavor carrier is a substance, generally in liquid form, that can absorb organic molecules. That's because everything with flavor, with the exception of salt, is made up of organic molecules. Water alone cannot not do the trick. Water cannot dissolve organic molecules, which is why oil and water do not mix. Collagen is a substance that comes from bones, tendons, and other tissues of animals. And because it comes from these animal sources, it also brings along with it the flavors that reside within the tissues.''Here I show you how I made duck and goose broth that I used to the duck meat balls soup(ciorba de perisoare).A stock pot should be tall and narrow. The reason for this is that a narrow pot will have less evaporation than a wider pot, and this is a good thing for stocks. Stocks are not made with lids on, as this tends to increase the cooking temperature, which decreases the amount of collagen that is extracted from the bones.

Make sure you don't boil the stock rapidly. Keep it at a very very low simmer, with just a few bubbles coming up. When you remove the solid ingredients at the end of cooking, do it gently, removing large chunks with a slotted spoon or skimmer and then pouring it through a fine strainer. Then, don't mash the ingredients in the strainer to remove more liquid, as you will add little parts of the solid items too.

Once chilled - refrigerate your finished stock, the fats will separate and harden and form a layer on the top of the liquid that you can then easily remove. After you've removed all the chunks of fat from the top, freeze the stock gel (either from naturally occurring gelatin or by adding more gelatin), and then let the gel melt-defrost very slowly in a fine strainer that the clear liquid separates from the gelatin which holds the impurities.
The freezing technique leave you with a nice clear bulion '''consommé'' and takes almost no effort. But the process of chilling the stock, freezing it, and letting it thaw at refrigerator temperatures takes a minimum of 48 hours.

The soup that I liked the most in my childhood (only thinking of it I have mouth-watering) and I want to talk about today, is meat balls soup. There are many types of soups which I hope we're going to talk about in next posts.Duck meat balls soup (Ciorba de Perisoare din Carne de Rata)
Twisted with gold leaf stock is a delicious soup that's both healthy and low in fat!

I made the meat balls with minced meat from the duck legs mixed with thyme, uncooked rice, egg, garlic, one chopped onions cooked in duck fat and some choped parsley.

I serve the duck consommé very hot on the side with a gold leaf mixed in and the meat balls on top of some uncooked julienne vegetables made from carrots, zuckini and red pepper.

It's a great way to get some vitamins and it's beautiful to serve when entertaining during the Holidays with the beautiful red and green uncooked juliennes vegetables in the soup.
To be continued.... Pin It Now!

Modern Romanian cuisine - (1)

What is Modern Romanian cuisine? I want to believe that there are a few chefs out there who do actually have a meaning of that and they will try to improve with passion the classic Romanian cuisine. For me modern cuisine must use high-quality local ingredients, preparing them in ways which combine traditional Romanian recipes with modern innovations. Also, modern approaches for me mean using cooking implements like food processors and maybe reducing the amount of fat, salt or sugar in dishes. I love as well to add extra ingredients for a final touch, to bring the dish to a different level. Romanian cuisine is a diverse blend of different dishes from several traditions with which it has come into contact, but it also maintains its own character. It has been greatly influenced by Ottoman cuisine while it also includes influences from the other cuisines such as Germans, Russians, Serbians and Hungarians. I love this cuisine that I grew up with.
Today, if you visit any Romanian supermarket you will see the multicultural influence in Romanian food. Today, the cuisine of Romania blends two types of cooking styles: a traditional one, which is used for everyday living in all Romanians houses and the Romanian cuisine that gathers influences from the Western civilizations and is used mainly in restaurants. .
The fast-food industry is developing quickly as well. The fast-food that is consumed in Romania has bad effects on people’s health. Romania is now among the first countries, in the heart disease top, and obesity also becomes a common health problem. Another factor that leads to bad health is represented by the high use of pork fat and pork meat in the preparation of the traditional dishes. In order to remediate these problems, we need to develop new preparation methods, based on the same ingredients with a healthy twist. Pork is the preferred meat, but chicken, beef, lamb, and fish are also popular.
There are many ways to categorize the style of Romanian cuisine but the most important I think is a classification based on regions of the country. Every region has its own fantastic distinct culinary traditions.
I will not speak here about the food from these regions but I'll try to share with you the most popular recipes that I think they deserve to be mentioned in my little story. The one of the most popular dish in Romanian cuisine is Sarmale.
Sarmale is a dish of cabbage, vine leaves or rhubarb leaves ( thanks to PENE, a friend of us, I just found out these are toxic, so I woudn't recommend anyone using them, even if I ate them when I was a child and I'm still here. I haven't eaten them in a very long time, but I remembered them and so I mentioned them in the post) rolled around a filling usually based on minced meat. Minced meat, rice, onions and salt, pepper and fresh thyme are mixed together and then rolled into large plant leaves, which may be cabbage (fresh or pickled), vine leaf (fresh or pickled) or rhubarbs leaves.

The combination is then boiled or cooked in the oven for several hours. While specific recipes vary across the regions, it is uniformly recognized that the best cooking method is slow cooking in large clay pots. Sarmale is one of the staple meals for festive occasions like Christmas, New Year, Easter, birthdays, etc. Also, I remember that my grandmother was making Sarmale without meat, where the meat was substituted with mushrooms and mince vegetables.

Unlike other European cultures, in Romania we use sour cabbage as opposed to fresh cabbage. At the end of the autumn, families traditionally prepare their own sour cabbage by pickling in salted water with thyme and horseradish (as whole cabbage, or as individual leaves, but not shredded) for sarmale-making.
Another kind of Sarmale are those rolled in (grape) vine leaves. Sarmale is normally a heavy dish and is usually eaten during winter. Traditionally, they are served along with mamaliga (polenta) or potatoes, sour cream and fresh chili. Here I will present you some of my Sarmale in new modern way that I made here in Estonia for different occasions and it has been a success every time.

Here I made ''Sarmale'' with  minced wild board, served with polenta cooked in goat milk, red pepper caviar and sour cream.

 Oven baked ''Sarmale'' with tomato sauce and sour cream served on soft polenta.

 Sarmale with deer meat served with white truffle polenta, chili hair and spicy fillo pastry. 

No meat - Sarmale with mushroom and brown rice, served with polenta, piri-piri chili and beetroot sour cream. 

Traditional Sarmale made in wine leaves served with polenta, smoked home made tomato sauce and parmesan. 
To be continued.... Pin It Now!