Ukrainian and international home cooking recipes
Potato is the clearest case of a single ingredient behaving in opposite ways depending on what has been done to it. Raw it fails; part-fried it comes out better than fresh. Taken by state: Raw — no Two things at once. It is mostly water, so ice crystals rupture the cells and it thaws to […]
Dry salting is the traditional method and the forgiving one: no brine, no weighing, and you cannot over-salt it. There is exactly one way to get it wrong, and it is in step two. Step 1. Choose the fat Back fat, 3–5 cm thick, white or faintly pink, with soft skin. Yellow fat is old; […]
Salo is pork back fat, cured with salt and eaten cold. Not bacon, not lard, and not an ingredient — in Ukraine it is a food in its own right, served sliced paper-thin with black bread, garlic and usually a pickle. The distinction from bacon matters more than it sounds. Bacon is belly, streaked with […]
Not in the shell — the contents expand and crack it. Out of the shell, whites and yolks behave in almost opposite ways, and knowing which is which saves a batch. Whites against yolks Whites Yolks Needs an additive No Yes, always Without it Nothing changes Sets into a gel that will not mix Keeps […]
The first syrnyk went into the pan as a patty and became a puddle. Adding flour helps a little and makes them taste of dough. The problem is almost never the recipe. The curd was too wet Cottage cheese is sold sitting in liquid; tvorog is pressed. A recipe written for the second one will […]
Cooked fish keeps less well than meat, and how much less depends on how oily it is. That is the whole logic here, so it is worth going by type. White fish — 3 days Cod, hake, pollock. The longest keeper among cooked fish, because there is little fat to oxidise. Freezes for three months. […]
Butter is the rare product that comes out of a freezer genuinely unchanged. Which has not stopped a fair amount of received wisdom accumulating around it. “Frozen butter is never the same” It is. Freezer damage in dairy is water turning to ice and tearing structure apart, and butter is 80% or more fat — […]
The beetroot went in deep red. An hour later the pot is brownish-orange and looks like vegetable soup. Nothing was overcooked, nothing burned — the pigment simply did what beetroot pigment does in a neutral pot at length. What actually happened Beetroot colour is a pigment that breaks down with prolonged heat and stabilises in […]
120 °C. That is the line. Below it, meringue dries and stays white; above it, the sugar starts to caramelise, and caramel is brown. Nothing has gone wrong with your egg whites — the oven was simply on the wrong side of one number. Why that temperature specifically Meringue is dried, not baked. The job […]
Half a roast chicken and a carcass, and the fridge shelf it will occupy for the next four days. What you do in the next ten minutes decides how much of it gets eaten. First: strip it while it is warm Two reasons, and neither is obvious. A whole bird cools slowly — the cavity […]