Mimi Makes Kreplach

I think that as tomorrow is Erev Yom Kippur, it’s a good idea to start cooking for the day. After Y.K. I’ll post about beautiful Tsfat.

Cooking for Yom Kippur? A while ago I came across a Jewish cookbook that had in its table of contents, “Recipes for Yom Kippur.” You turn to the indicated page, and printed there more or less, is this: “There are no recipes for Yom Kippur. You’re supposed to be fasting. Shame on you!”

I don’t remember the book’s name or author. Can anyone identify them?

But we need recipes and menu suggestions for before the fast and for breaking the fast. So who am I to argue? I decided to make kreplach, which are traditionally served in soup as part of the pre-fast meal.  Jewish Cookery (the cookbook mentioned in this post) has instructions for plain, traditional kreplach.

Confession: I had never before made kreplach. My inspiration came from the object below, which I found in a junk shop in the shuk.

I thought it was a trivet, or hot-plate. The shop owner said, “You can use it for that. But it’s really a Russian invention for making kreplach. You roll your noodle dough out – fill up the honeycomb spaces with cooked chicken- place another layer of dough down on top of all – and seal everything together with your rolling pin.”

Like this:

What he didn’t tell me was how to get the cute little kreplach out of the kreplach maker. I stood there nervously poking them out with my thumb, then with a spoon. No matter which way, I still tore the tender pasta apart so that the filling oozed out. Lots of those aborted kreplach went into the garbage.

…An imaginary Babushka  (Russian grandmother) who was standing behind me adjusted her head-kerchief and breathed a spooky chuckle into my ear. I’ll bet Babushka could make 100 kreplach in 15 minutes, but I found all this frustrating. I gave up on the kreplach maker and saved the few surviving dumplings to show you.

Sigh. Over to the ravioli cutter. This might not be as exotic, I thought, but it’ll be a lot easier. (And frankly, while I’m inventing be-kerchiefed old ladies who could make kreplach in their sleep, I’d rather invent an Italian Nona than a Russian Babushka. At least I can understand Italian.)

Well, it was easier, but still fairly time-consuming and fiddly.

In the end, I found the easiest way to cut the dumplings was just that – to cut them out with an ordinary knife.

Now for the recipe.

First, make your filling.

You can saute 1 1/2 cup chopped chicken or turkey or beef in a little oil till the meat crumbles, then add chopped parsley and 1 tsp. onion juice. Some prefer to fill their kreplach with cooked, mashed potatoes, well seasoned with fried onion.

What I did was take cooked soup chicken and mince it with my mezza-luna. To the cooked chicken I added a handful of cilantro and two or three stalks of green onion.

That’s a pasta maker to the far right and back. I put my noodle dough through it because deep in my heart, I know that I can never roll out pasta dough as thin as the machine can get it. I used a standard Corell tea/coffee cup as a measure for the shredded chicken.

To the minced chicken/herb mixture, add 1 beaten egg and seasonings (s&p).

Cover the filling and put it in the fridge for the meantime. Now for the noodle dough.

Ingredients:

2 cups ordinary white flour

2 beaten eggs

2 Tblsp. plus 2 tsp. water

a pinch of salt

1. Either put the flour into a bowl and make a well in the center, mixing the beaten eggs in, or put the whole thing in the food processor.

2. Add the water and the salt. If making the dough by hand, knead firmly for several minutes, until the dough is a uniform ball. Set it aside to rest for 15 minutes.

If using the food processor, add the water and the salt and whizz for 2-3 minutes on high. You should have a ball of dough. Set it aside to rest 15 minutes.

3. Cut the ball of dough into 4 pieces. Either roll it out by hand or force it through the pasta machine. Either way, you want the thinnest possible layer of dough, so that the filling shows through the delicate paste.

4. Place teaspoons of filling at regular intervals along the dough. Cover the dough and filling with another thin dough layer. Press in between the fillings with your fingertips and cut out squares or rounds.

5. Have plenty of salted, boiling water ready. Carefully lower kreplach into it. Don’t crowd the pan; allow the dumplings room to expand in cooking and float up to the top. This should take 3-4 minutes. The kreplach are done cooking when they’ve floated up and cooked 5 minutes.

May be made a day in advance and refrigerated.

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And here are my very first handmade kreplach, in soup. They look as awkward as a 5-year old’s crayon portrait of Mommy. Never mind, they taste pretty good.