“Surprise” Pork Cutlets
The surprise is literal: under a cap of grated processed cheese hides a mix of boiled mushrooms, nuts, dried apricots and prunes. It sounds odd until you taste it — dried fruit does for pork roughly what apple does for roast goose, and the nuts give the topping a grainy texture mushrooms alone would lack.
The beer is not an overnight marinade but a dip of a few minutes, and that distinction matters. Pork pounded to about a centimeter (⅜ inch) picks up the malty note in that time without taking on water; leave it longer and the meat steams in its own liquid instead of browning.
Processed cheese here means the soft, foil-wrapped melting cheese sold everywhere in the post-Soviet world, closest in character to a spreadable wedge like Laughing Cow. It only grates when part-frozen — at room temperature it smears across the blades — so give it 20 to 30 minutes in the freezer while you deal with the filling; a mild firm melter such as young Gouda or Monterey Jack is a workable substitute. If the apricots and prunes are hard, steep them in boiling water for ten minutes, or the dry fruit will pull moisture out of the meat rather than adding its own.
Forty minutes in the oven, then straight to the table while the cheese still pulls. Keep the side plain — boiled potatoes, rice, buckwheat. Two and a quarter pounds of pork under that topping is rich enough without a sauce. If mayonnaise bothers you, thick sour cream does the same job with less fat, though it browns less.
Part of Ukrainian cuisine — 464 more recipes in the section.
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Ingredients
Instructions
Boil the mushrooms in salted water, chop the nuts, finely chop the dried apricots and prunes, and mix everything together.
Grate the processed cheese, having first frozen it in the freezer. Slice the onions into rings.
Cut the meat into 8-10 portions and pound it well — the pieces should come out about palm-sized. Put the meat in the beer for a few minutes.
Lay the meat on an oiled baking sheet, season each piece with salt and pepper, top with onion rings, and add 1 tablespoon of the mushroom-and-fruit mixture on each.
Cover everything with the grated cheese, top with a thin layer of mayonnaise, and bake in the oven for 40 minutes.
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