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The Slavic east and the Balkans · Volume 26, Rye, the Samovar and the Sturgeon’s Retreat

Kulebyaka

Russia

Kulebyaka, a large layered pie of fish, mushroom and cabbage separated by thin blini: a long golden brown oval pie with a deeply glazed, burnished pastry crust, one end cut away to reveal distinct horizontal layers.

Illustration

Time
2 hours 15

A yeasted or laminated dough encloses layers of filling, each layer physically separated from its neighbour by a very thin blini baked inside the pie.

As tradition built it

Rises 60 to 90 minutes and 20 to 30 more; proves 15 to 25; bakes 30 to 45 minutes at 180 to 190°C.

Ingredients

The dough

  • 250 ml warm milk
  • 7 g dry yeast
  • 1 to 1½ tbsp sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 60 g butter, melted
  • 550 to 650 g wheat flour
  • 1 yolk and 1 tbsp milk egg wash

The separating blini

  • 1 egg
  • 180 ml milk
  • 90 to 110 g flour
  • a pinch salt
  • 1 tbsp butter

The filling

  • 500 to 600 g boneless salmon or pink salmon
  • 120 g rice, weighed dry and cooked
  • 1 onion
  • 20 to 30 g butter
  • 2 eggs, hard-boiled
  • to taste herbs
  • to taste salt and pepper

Method

The dough

  1. Mix the warm milk, yeast and sugar and leave 10 minutes. Add the egg, salt and melted butter.
  2. Work in the flour a little at a time until soft and elastic. Cover and leave 60 to 90 minutes, until doubled.
  3. Knock it back and leave 20 to 30 minutes more.

Filling and blini

  1. Soften the onion lightly in the butter. Cut the fish into 1.5 to 2cm cubes and season.
  2. Mix the cooled rice with the onion, chopped eggs and herbs. Everything must be cold before assembly.
  3. Mix the blini batter smooth and fry thin blini in a buttered pan until set.

Assembly

  1. Roll the dough into a rectangle 5 to 7mm thick. Lay a blin down first, to keep the base from going soggy.
  2. Lay the filling lengthways, 3 to 4cm in from the edges: rice, a blin, fish, a blin, rice again.
  3. Bring the dough over, pinch the seam, and fold the ends like an envelope.
  4. Turn it seam side down onto parchment and cut 2 to 4 slits in the top.
  5. Prove 15 to 25 minutes, brush with the yolk and milk, and bake 30 to 45 minutes at 180 to 190°C.

Notes

Pirogi of this kind are documented among the oldest dishes in the whole cuisine, present at feasts, in daily life, and even carried on military campaigns; the seventeenth-century traveller Adam Olearius is cited as an early foreign observer who catalogued their real variety.

The recipe is koolinar.ru's classic fish and rice kulebyaka. Its cabbage filling and its meat and mushroom filling are separate alternatives, not layers of the same pie. Chef Vladislav Piskunov of Matryoshka in Moscow, in Sobaka.ru, rolls a rich dough paper thin around six layers of sterlet, salmon and pike-perch with béchamel, blini, mushroom caviar and millet, bakes it 35 minutes at 180°C, and rests it 30 minutes under a towel. Neither uses buckwheat.

What a modern chef changes

Each filling cooked to its own doneness, reinforced separating blini, and a beurre blanc from the poaching liquor

Method

  1. Cook each filling layer to its own correct doneness before assembly, rather than relying on the bake to cook everything through at once: the fish gently poached, the mushroom confit, so each retains a distinct texture the traditional single long bake tends to blur together.
  2. Make the separating blini genuinely thin and structurally sound, with a small amount of egg white worked in for strength, so they hold their moisture-barrier role reliably at scale.
  3. Finish the pastry itself with a proper egg wash and a brief blast in a very hot oven at the very end of the bake, for a shine and crackle beyond what a traditional wood-fired result would show.
  4. Serve with a chinois-strained beurre blanc built from the fish's own poaching liquor, rather than the traditional plain melted butter.
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