Burgers from the Balkans - čevapčiči

I am learning that BBQ is traditional for memorial weekend. So it is time to pay tribute to čevapčiči or ćevapi, as they are commonly called in Serbia and Bosnia, where they consider them a national dish. Chances are you have heard of Korean BBQ, and chances are that you have not heard of Serbian BBQ. Which is unfortunate, the pleskavica burgers, simply have no competition, period.

Čevapčiči and pljeskavica are pretty much the same dish, just that the meat is shaped differently. But first, how does one pronounce it? Chevapchichi is my best guess for transliteration. To hear the pronunciation and to see what I believe is a traditional way to make them, there is always a YouTube video available. Note, the comments in that video are embarrassing, it will take forever to forget the wars in the past.

One can get very wrapped up in a debate about what kind of meat to use. For example, in Muslim parts, minced pork would definitely not be a good candidate. My favorite combination is to combine ground beef, ground pork, and ground lamb, one part each. But sometimes one doesn't have the three kinds of meat available, or maybe you want to make čevapčiči a bit leaner. Using just ground beef will do just fine.

I used 2lb of 85% lean ground grassfed beef. I added one finely minced onion, a 3-4 minced garlic cloves, and a bunch of spices. Note that my spices are anything but traditional! I use about 2 tablespoons of each korean chili, california chili, ancho chili, and ground cumin. I also added about 1 tablespoon of ground coriander, and around 1 tablespoon of salt. I have learned that adding a bit of liquid helps with the mixing and also with cooking - I usually add a few tablespoons of water and a bit of vegetable oil. Mix it all up well and you get a mixture looking like a well seasoned hamburger.

The one and only way to make sure you seasoned the meat well is to make a small patty and pan fry it in a small pan. It will only take a minute or so per side, and it totally worth doing. Correct the seasoning if needed, but remember you cannot take spices away, so it is better to start with less salt and then you can add more if you wish.

Next, let us shape the meat into a small rolls. Having your hands wet will help prevent the meat from sticking to your hands and the shaping will be easier. For one čevapčiči roll you need a few tablespoons of meat - try out and you'll see what works for you. Making čevapčiči too large will make cooking harder, so going on a small side is just fine. I think I made them too large this time :)

At this point you can let the meat rest for a while, or let it in your fridge for a day. If you kept čevapčiči rolls in the fridge, let them warm up to the room temperature, it will help them cook more evenly. That will help the flavor, but you can also cook čevapčiči right away. Preheat your grill, set the heat on medium and cook them about 3-4 minutes per side. The time really depends on the size of čevapčiči rolls, temperature of the meat, and your grill. If you grill is too hot you will burn the meat on the outside and have it raw in the middle. The same can be the case if the meat is too cold.

I like my steaks medium rare, but minced meat I cook well done, and create juiciness by adding spices, onion, and liquid to the meat. It's all about salmonela and other nasty bacteria. On the steak, these will grow on the top of the meat, so grilling will kill them. For ground meat, it is all mixed up, so the bacteria may be everywhere, so the only way too cook it is to make the meat well done. Or to use sous vide, which I have not tried yet for cevapcici, but I do intend to.

Back at home we would consume čevapčiči with ajvar and kajmak and vegetables. And some crusty bread, of course. If we made them in the patty form, they would be called pljeskavica, which just had to be eaten in a special bun called lepinja. Here in the US, ajvar is very easy to get, kajmak is possible but harder, so you can recreate the exeprience if you wish. Or you use them as a meat part of your dish. For example, last time I added čevapčiči to gnocchi in tomato sauce, and the result floored our Korean friend.

The wonderful celeriac

I was looking at my food pictures and decided it was time to do some catch up. Celeriac is out of season now, unfortunately. But the fall is coming, and with it the goodness of root vegetables.

Jasna introduced me to this strange root. Her family would make celeriac salad as fllows: Boil celeriac root, peel it, cut into small cubes, mix with dressing made of lemon, oil, and heaps of garlic. Let is stand in the fridge for about a day or so, and then eat. Extremely tasty, highly recommended.

That was the only use of celeriac that we have known of. As much as I liked it, peeling the cooked celeriac was a bit messy, and it was kind of hard to find. so we made it only occasionally. What a giant mistake that was!

Cooking experimentation became more of a norm for us, and I got into a habit of calling on my pal Google to help me explore what one can do with certain ingredients. We also discovered Milk Pail market in Mountain View, which carries all sorts of great things in addition to their sinful collection of cheeses. They seem to be a reliable source of celeriac!

Here are two ways to prepare celeriac. First, we will peel it. The simplest way is to make a cut at the top where the leaves/stalks grow, and create a flat surface. The flat surface will keep the root stable on your cutting board while you use your large knife to cut off the skin. You can't really peel it too thin. It seems wasteful, but the surface is not smooth enough for that. The same peeling technique works great for other things such as squash, though for butternut squash there is no substitute for a vegetable peeler.

Peel our celeriac root

Now we have our root peeled, looking white and great. One easy way to consume it is to eat it raw. We were surprised how tasty it was, so this is now our favorite way to eat celeriac. We grade it with the food processor, and mix it with our favorite dressing, and when we have the time we let it stand for 1/2 hour or so, so that the root strands soak up the dressing. Leaving it in your fridge overnight works great too.

Our standard dressing consists of the spectacular pumpkin seed oil from my uncle's farm, salt, and lemon. That is it. Here is the result.

Celeriac salad

If you want to cook celeriac, you can sautee it. First cut it into small cubes - if you have two flat surfaces, you can cut the root into slices, then stack the slices and cut them across:

Then cut it cross-wise, and the cubes will appear. Alternatively, attack one slice at a time. It will be slower but therapeutic.

Heat up your favorite pan, use your favorite oil or butter, and at a medium heat saute the root, stirring periodically. Here I sauteed it with some onion and garlic, and I also added some cut up king oyster mushrooms. Season with salt early in the cooing phase - the salt will help draw the water from the veggies and will aid caramelization. The dish is done when you decide it is done, and before the vegetables are burned. You can cover the pan if you wish. This will speed up the cooking process, but will yield a different texture because the lid will trap the water in the pan. Let me repeat - do not crank up the heat way up, medium to medium-high heat is what you want here.

I made this for breakfast along with some scrambled eggs. You can use it as a side dish for almost anything, or mix it with quinoa or buckwheat groats, or pasta.

No-knead sourdough bread with steel-cut oats

When we first arrived to Canada, we encountered several disappointments. By far, the biggest one were the washing machines. Back then, the front loaders had not made the voyage across the big pond yet. So we were sentenced to destructive 20-minute top-loader cycles. I can say that pretty much every European we have met shared our dismay.

At the top of the list of disappointment were potatoes and bread. Since this is a food blog, potatoes will earn their own post of three, in due time. Today, we focus on bread.

Truthfully, good crusty bread was available in Waterloo, just that the supermarkets in walking distance from our place didn't carry it. You had to know about the little German bakery, make a trek there, and empty your bank account for a loaf of bread.

This started my quest, I was determined to make good bread at home. Years had passed, I got good in making wheat-free soda bread, we discovered very good heavy 100% rye bread and so on. The art of proper home-made bread eluded me until my friend Walt pointed me to a NY Times article with a recipe for no-knead bread.

That was a true revolution! The bread came out of the oven crackling, to quote the same friend Walt, who also supplied me with a container of wonderfully aged sourdough starter. I tried several recipes from breadtopia.com, and our staple soon became sourdough bread with steel cut oats.

Quite a sight, ha? And so trivial to make. Even my mom admitted the no-knead method was far superior and much less work than anything she had tried. My mom can and does bake very well!

Put 1/2 cup of steel-cut oats in a large bowl. I like to use a glass bowl because my plastic wrap sticks much better to glass than it does to steel. Add 12 oz of warm water and stir. If you heat the water too much, you will kill the yeast in the starter. Add some sourdough starter, and mix it all well with a Danish dough whisk if you have one. If you don't have one, it is $8 very well spent.

I hear you screaming. HOW MUCH SOURDOUGH STARTER? The breadtopia dude, who I think really knows what he is doing, uses 1/4 cup of sourdough, or 1/4 teaspoon of instant yeast if you do not have sourdough. I definitely suggest one does not use more than 1/4 tsp of instant yeast, otherwise the bread will taste very yeasty. Jasna will confirm that from suffering through my early attempts. Sourdough starter, at least mine, is much more forgiving. I usually eyeball it, and am pretty generous, often using a cup of starter. I suggest you start with 1/4 cup and then experiment. Starters do differ, and you may not want your bread to be super sour. My starter is nicely aged - I have had it for about 5 years, and Walt claimed it was already 40 years old when he gave it to me. It has a mellow flavor, a nice hint of sourness, and is super vigorous, so I just love using it.

Danish dough whisk

I have never heard of a Danish dough whisk until I watched videos on breadtopia.com. It really looks like a bent hanger, and I bet you can make one yourself. I started out without it, then I saw it was $8 and bought it immediately. The whisk makes mixing of the stiff batter much easier. Additionally, it must be one of the geekiest kitchen gadgets, so everyone should definitely have one. Just imagine the powerful impression you are making on people visiting your kitchen.

Back to making bread! We just mixed water, steel-cut oats, and a mysterious amount of sourdough starter. Now we add a combination of flours. I like to use 1.5 cups of white flour and 1.5 cups of gluten free flour I buy in Costco. I like the gluten-free flour for its flavor - it is a mix of a variety of bean flours, and potato starch, and probably more interesting things. Sometimes I use 1.5 cups of buckwheat flour, and sometimes I use 1.5 cups of rye flour. You get the pattern - 1/2 of the flour is white, and one can play with the rest. All together 3 cups of flour works well.

Add 1 to 2 teaspoons of salt, and stir everything using the geeky dough whisk. When everything is nicely incorporated, you are done. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap, place it somewhere cool, and wait.

The dough after 12 or so hours

After 8 to 18 hours you will be ready to work the dough, have it rise again, and then bake. At that point, you need about 2 hours of time. You'll be busy maybe for 20 minutes during that time, but you have to finish the bread. Well, you could do the second rise in the fridge and make things even more flexible.

Note that the rising time really depends on the temperature, your sourdough, humidity and so on. For me, overnight seems to work perfectly.

I flour the surface of my giant cutting board pretty thickly: I usually use 3 heaping tablespoons of flour that I spread with the back of the spoon across a large rectangular area on the board. Then I place the risen dough from the bowl right in the middle of the flour. The dough will be like a thick mud, so I add another tablespoon or two of flour on the top and smear it around. I stretch the dough into a rectangle and fold it. I repeat that a couple of times - this is an important step because this helps with gluten creation. I suggest watching the breadtopia dude how he does it, and then find your own way.

After a few foldings, I knead the dough ball it until I use up all the flour I put on the board. The dough is fairly wet, so it picks up the flour pretty fast. This is just my way of using up the flour and minimize the cleanup.

Lightly grease another bowl. The one that you used for rising will be dirty. Shape the dough into a ball, and stretch and fold the ball a few times. The dough then goes in the bowl, cover it with plastic wrap for the second rise.

The second rise will take between 1 to 2 hours. For me it is always about an hour, maybe a little less. In about 30 minutes I start preheating the oven to 500F, along with a heavy pot with a lid. Make sure that the pot and the lid can take the 500F temperature. Glass lids often cannot handle that kind of temperature and may shatter. I usually use a cast-iron pot because it retains the heat very well, but I have had very good results using regular pots.

Preheating will take some time. If the oven doesn't go all the way to 500F, I suggest cranking it as high as you can.

When the dough doubles in size, it is baking time! With your kevlar oven mitts, take the pot out of the oven, close the oven door, remove the lid, and fold in the dough. Make sure that the surface you put your pot on can take the high heat. A wooden cutting board is a good choice. Make some cuts in the dough so that your bread is pretty. Here is what I do:

Cover the pot, put it back in the oven, and set the timer to 30 minutes. The wet dough will generate steam inside the covered pot and the effect on the crust will be the same is it is in commercial oven where they steam the bread while it bakes.

When the 30 minutes are up, remove lid from the pot, reduce the heat to 450F, and bake for another 15 minutes.

I usually put the lid somewhere out of the way - remember, it is VERY hot - and put a towel on it, reminding myself that I must not pick the lid with my bare hands. If you have kids, the lid, and later the pot are not something they should be able to get close to.

After 15 minutes, the bread is done! Turn the pot over and the bread will fall out very nicely and easily. The pot should not need any significant cleaning.

Cool the bread on a rack and then eat it. Jasna and I cut the loaf in smaller chunks and freeze them. After thawing the bread will taste great.

Addendum!

This remains my favorite bread recipe. However, I changed it a little bit, so let me record the ingredients and the procedure, briefly.

• In a large bowl mix:
• 1 cup steel cut oats
• 14 oz warm water
• 1 cup sourdough starter (you can use less) or 1/4 tsp of instant yeast
• Add 3 cups of all-purpose flour or bread flour, preferably with high protein content
• Add 1 to 1.5 tsp salt
• Mix well, preferably with your geeky Danish dough whisk
• Cover with plastic wrap, let rise in a cool place for 8-18 hours or so, until the dough approximately doubles in volume
• Turn on a well floured surface, stretch and fold the dough a few times, knead in the flour from the board. Use enough flour to prevent the dough from sticking to the board.
• Put the dough-ball in a greased bowl, cover with plastic wrap, let rise until it doubles in volume, for about an hour or so.
• In about 30 mins put a heavy pot with a lid in your oven, set the heat to 500F. Make sure the pot and the lid can take such heat. If needed, a lower temperature will work, but you may need to adjust the baking time.
• When the dough has about doubled in size, place the dough into the preheated pot, score the dough with a paring knife, cover with the lid, and bake for 30 minutes. Use heavy duty gloves/mitts. 
• Remove the lid, reduce the temperature to 450F, bake for 15 minutes.
• Turn the bread out the pot, cool on a rack.

Addendum 2!

Last year we acquired a grain mill. Sounds excessive? Maybe 😊

We did some reading and realized that commercial flours, including whole wheat ones, are processed quite heavily and depleted of many nutrients. That made us think, even though our bread and flour consumption has been quite low. The second part of our motivation was that we wanted flours that are hard to purchase - quinoa, millet, split pea, beans, lentils, ...

So we took a plunge and after almost a year, I am still certain that was a good decision. Aroma of freshly milled wheat is something everyone should experience! The flavor of our bread went up quite a few notches. Probably the most impressive change is in pizza dough - not just the flavor, but also the consistency of the dough is out of this world, despite being whole wheat.

We adjusted our bread recipe to used whole wheat flour. We still use 3 cups of flour, which we obtain from milling 2 cups of grains. The usual combination includes 1.5 cups of hard winter wheat berries, either red or white. The remaining 1/2 cup is what we play with. The most popular choice seems to be millet, but we also use quinoa or buckwheat.

We also upped the amount of steel cut oats to 1 cup. I tried that once as an experiment, looking for adding more fiber to our bread. The result was, in opinion, superior, so 1 cup of oats is the new standard.

Addendum 3 (May 2020)

The next iteration of this recipe is 100% rye bread. For a while we stopped baking bread because we had to go gluten free. The go-to recipe for that period were gluten free muffins. Super tasty, but we missed the bread crust. When we were able to relax our diet somewhat, we tried 100% rye bread with such good result that we make it regularly now. We buy a large bag of rye berries, they mill really easily, and the taste is anything but the bitterness I remember from rye bread. We also switched feeding our sourdough starter with rye only, and the started has been doing just fine.

The main difference seems to be that the dough is wetter. I may need to play with the amount of liquid - but so far, the wetness of the dough has not cause an issue.

Summary:

• 12 oz of warm water
• 1 cup rye sourdough starter
• 3 cups of 100% rye flour, highly recommended to mill it freshly from 2 cups of rye berries
• 1-2 tsp salt
• 1 cup oats, steel cut are the best, rolled work too
• First rise: Mix everything up in a large bowls, cover with plastic wrap, let sit for 24 h
• Add some more rye flour, about a cup or more, mix/knead the dough in the same bowl, cover with plastic wrap and let rise for another 1-2 hours
• Place a covered pot in the oven, heat to 500F
• Place the dough in the pot, make a few slits, place the cover on the pot, and bake for 30 minutes at 500F
• Remove the cover and bake for additional 15 minutes at 425F
• Cool in a rack. Eat. Slice and freeze what you have not finished in a day.

Addendum 4 (August 2021) - 72h rise whole grain walnut bread

Gluten remains a challenge, so we have largely been making stove-top gluten-free flatbread: Millet and buckwheat flours have worked really well. But, we missed regular bread so I started to poke around: I read that gluten tended to be much less of a problem in Europe, and a speculation was that it was because the wheat had not been that heavily modified, and that it had less gluten. So my interest turned to less or not modified grains such as spelt, kamut, emmer, enikorn which apparently have a different kind of gluten or sometimes less gluten. Then I came across articles (example)  mentioning that long cold rise resulted in shorter gluten strands, making the bread easier to digest. And of course, the one and only Kenji Lopez-Alt, has already posted about his experimentation with long rise.

So I gave it a shot, and the result so far has been very encouraging. The bread is beyond tasty, and it appears to be much less troubling, if troubling at all, when it comes to our gluten sensitivity. Here is what a four-days affair looks like:

1. Feed the starter: mix 1 part water, 1 part water, weight wise, and add 25% weight wise of sourdough starter. Cover loosely and let rise at the room temperature for about 24h. This gives you levain.
2. Mix together the following:
1. 500g flour, freshly milled. Einkorn and emmer have worked best for us, both flavor wise, and gluten sensitivity wise, with eiknorn becoming our favorite.
2. Add 8-10g salt and mix it with the flour.
3. 300-350g cold filtered water
4. 150g levain
5. Optionally: 1/2 cup steel cut oats. 
3. Fold the mixture a bit, it will start developing some strength.
4. Transfer to a bowl (oiled, optionally, or use the same bowl), cover with a lid or plastic wrap, and let rise in your fridge for about 72h. 
5. Take the dough out of the fridge, and leave it to reach about the room temperature.
6. Knead in a handful or two or walnuts, and optionally add more flour if the dough is too wet to knead.
7. Let rise for about 2h, it should about double in size.
8. About 45 mins before the bread is ready, preheat the oven with a heat-proof pot and lid to 500F. I used an cast-iron dutch oven.
9. When the bread is ready and oven and pot pre-heated, fold the bread some more, put it in the pot, and bake covered at 500F for 30 minutes.
10. Uncover the pot (use oven mitts!) and bake uncovered at 425F for another 15 minutes.
11. Cool the bread on a wire rack, and exercise restraint when eating it.

Artichoke Caponata

Jasna and I went to graduate school at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario. We arrived in Waterloo before RIM aka Blackberry was a success, which means we experienced Waterloo before its high-tech boom. Even for two graduate students who came from a non-first-world country, Waterloo was a dingy place. We were longing for all things related to home, and one day someone pointed us to a tiny hole-in-a-wall store called Vincenzo's. They carried Fructal's fruit juices, something every Slovenian appreciated deeply.

So we visited Vincenzo's. The store was tiny and packed beyond what should be legal. But they did carry the good stuff, and we became regulars. We were not alone in thinking that Vincenzo's was making a big difference in a town with extra wide road shoulders that can accommodate Mennonnite buggies. Since then, the Caccioppoli brothers took full advantage of the influx of money and consequent upscaling of Waterloo. Their store has moved twice, and is now as spiffy as any high-end market in Silicon Valley.

We loved Vincenzo's sandwitches. In fact, we still love them and get them every time we are in Waterloo. A standard ingredient for sandwiches was an addictive spread/dip called artichoke caponata. One cold purchase that dip on its own at a ridiculous price, which we did, despite being poor graduate students. One day, I realized that the jar of caponata had a label on it, listing the ingredients. That was the last time we helped Caccioppoli brothers make handsome profit on that particular item.

The list of ingredients was super simple: mayonnaise, asiago cheese, and artichoke hearts. So I went to Vincenzos, got the cheese and artichokes. I made the mayo in our food processor, added the shredded cheese and drained artichokes to the food processor, ran the machine for a minute or so, and made the caponata. It was exactly it!

You may ask about the proportions. Frankly, I don't record them and wing it every time. The recipe is very tolerant of variations. Even a caponata recipe I found on the web specifies a large range for how much mayonnaise one should use. I prefer more cheese and artichokes, and just enough mayo. I vastly prefer marinated artichoke hearts, and I like fresh asiago over aged one, but all of that is akin splitting hairs. The result is beyond tasty and is also very versatile. You can spread in on a piece of bread and optionally add a piece of ham, or you can use it as a vegetable dip, or add it as cold sauce to steak or braised beef.

While we are at it, let me put in a plug for home-made mayonnaise.

We almost never keep a jar of mayonnaise in our fridge. Usually the jars are too large, and few store-bought mayonnaises can compete in flavor with Tommy mayonnaise we were using back in Slovenia. Well, that was true before we discovered the Korean supermarket that carries Kewpie mayo from Japan. That one is a force to be reckoned with.

I still tend to make the mayo when we need it. This way there is no need for me to plan ahead, we make only as much as we need. Most importantly, we are reminded that mayonnaise is nothing but an emulsion of oil, lemon juice, mustard, and egg yolk. Pretty much 100% fat. Making it yourself really curbs the consumption!

Another good thing about making your mayo is that you can choose what oil to use. Olive oil yields mayonnaise with a very strong olive-oil taste. Vegetable or avocado oil have much more neutral taste, giving one much more freedom to add spices to affect the flavor. On the other hand, the home-made mayo does contain raw egg yolks, which presents a risk that some people are not willing to take.

The procedure for making mayo is really trivial: To the bowl of your food processor add two egg yolks, a tablespoon of Dijon style mustard, a pinch of salt, and juice of one lemon. Pulse a bit until everything is mixed up well. While the machine is running, drizzle in SLOWLY the oil. About one cup will be the right quantity. You will hear it when the mayo thickens - the sound that a food processor makes is quite distinct. Stop the machine, taste the result and adjust the seasoning if needed.

This is a very basic mayonnaise recipe. You can add spices, herbs, and/or garlic, roasted or not, and you can combine different oils for different results. Lately I have been using 1 part of olive oil and 3 parts of vegetable or avocado oil.

Summary:

• 1 cup mayonnaise (vary to taste)
• 2 cups shredded asiago (vary to taste)
• 1 cup marinated artichoke hearts
• 1/2 cup roasted garlic (vary to taste)

Method:

Mix and chop all ingredients in a food processor until artichokes are chopped pretty finely.