Zrazy

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Zrazy (Belarusian: Зра́зы) — very popular meat dish of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, notably of the Belarusian cuisine popular in many countries.

Nobody knows exactly when this famous dish was invented, and what coutry of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth boasts the honor of this invention. Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine - all lay claims to this common heritage. However, the same dish is known in regional Italian cuisine for ages, and it may well be that, together with many others it was brought to the East by the famous Princess of Milan, Bona Sforza. In literature, the first exact recipe of zrazy dates back to 1783.

Classical zrazy are the ‘twisted’ ones, made of thin slices of chopped meat (beef as a rule) stuffed with vegetable, mushroom, eggs, potato etc.

There are dozens of classic stuffing combinations, but nobody forbids to invent the new one and to surprise your guests with some unexpected shade of the commonly known taste. Zrazy are eaten with the sauce in which they were stewed, and are usually garnished with crumbly kashas, buckwheat and barley above all.

For the twisted zrazy you'll need some 17-25 oz of good soft beef. Washed and dried meat is cut into thin slices, slightly chopped, salted and peppered, filled with stuffing, twisted and fixed with a thread and/or toothpick. After being shortly fried in a hot oil, zrazy are placed to a casserole together with celery, onions, spices etc. and covered with hot stock, covered with a lid firmly and stewed on a low temperature for 45-50 min. Threads/totthpicks are then being removed, sauces rubbed through a sift and is sometimes densed with flour, sour cream etc.

Minced zrazy appeared much later, as an imitation of a classical shape, partly owing to the necessity to utilize the leftovers of meat and other food that are always present at kitchen. The best mince for such zrazy is mixture of beef and pork, with finely chopped and fried onions, boiled egg, some vegetable, cereal or, indeed, almost any food that is difficult to use otherwise. The common treat with their twisted relatives is that they are also fried and then stewed in a sauce. That frequently happens in the history of cuisine, when a certain name of a dish gradually spreads to cover the dishes rather distant from a classical archetype; and, of course, Belarus could not manage without potato zrazy!