Moldovan Plăcintă with Cheese and Greens
Plăcintă is a special pie with cottage cheese, pimpkin, meat, potato, apples and other kinds of filling. Plăcintă looks like a flat cake, and it’s cooked from puff pastry or yeasted dough.
My grandma used to fry plăcintăs on a dry frying pan, and then brushed ready-made plăcintăs with butter. People cook like that in Bessarabia and it tastes gorgeous! Even now I remember delicious flavour of those flat pies that were burning my fingers when I grabbed them straight from a frying pan.
Moldavian chef Denys Brovchak cooks plăcintă in an absolutely different way, Denys’s recipe resembles culinary traditions of Moldova. He kneads yeasted dough for pies according to all rules, and the dough should “rest” well. Plăcintăs should be baked in the oven, not fried.
- Dough:
- Mix the yeast, 3-4 tbs o flour, 100 ml of water and sugar
- Set the dough in a warm place for 10-15 minutes
- Add the egg, salt and remaining water in the dough and gradually add the remaining flour and knead the dough
- Let the dough “rest” for 1 hour
- Filling:
- Mix the cottage cheese with chopped greens and eggs
- Season with salt and mix it once again
- How to bake plăcintăs
- Roll out the dough into a thin layer
- Spread the filling over it
- Fold it as an envelope
- Put plăcintăs on a baking sheet, brushed with oil
- Bake in preheated oven (200⁰S) about 8 minutes
The dish in the photograph was cooked by the restaurant for this story. Photo: Oleksandr Slyadnyev.