Noshe Djan: Afghan Food and Cookery

Boulanee

Page 82

Cuisine: Central Asian | Course Type: Other

(1 review)

Tags: hand-held pies

Recipe Review

31st May 2011

friederike from Berlin,

It's a bit of a disappointment. I made these last night to bring them to work today as I didn't have time to go home for dinner. I had some issues with the preparation, but the few small bites I prepared for snacking were quite nice. The dough was crunchy and delicious, the filling wasn't that spectacular but not really a problem either. However, the boulanees I had for dinner today didn't resemble those from yesterday at all. The dough was slobby, salty and little else, and the filling was soo overpowering! Not a good idea. Clearly, Boulanees are only a good idea when you can serve them immedeately and eat them hot. Also, the boulanees I made for snacking yesterday were much smaller (on circles with a diameter of 7 cm instead of 13 cm) and therefore took less filling, which might be why the filling wasn't an issue then.

Preparation:
I enjoyed that the preparation of these was pretty easy. The dough is more or less 2 parts flour, one part water, a little salt and that's it, the filling doesn't need any pre-cooking, only 'knead the leeks until they begin to get soft' (really!). The dough was quite hard to roll out in the beginning, but once you've reached a thickness of about 1 cm it actually became easy. Otherwise you can always try to use a pasta machine.

However, you're supposed to fry the boulanees, which does not work at all. You need to deep fry them instead. Also, with a diameter of 13 cm I could only use 1 tbsp filling per boulanee instead of 2-3 tbsp, and yet I ended up with half of the dough unused.

We also cut a few long strips of leftover dough and deepfried them as well - delicious! I could imagine adding some spices to the dough, then frying strips of dough and serving them as a kind of homemade Grissini. As we have some much leftover dough, I'm considering whether we should try to use it as a pizza base, though I'm a little hesitant if its then really necessary to deep fry the dough.