The Slavic east and the Balkans · Volume 27, Steppe, Forest and the Reclaimed Kitchen
Banosh
Ukraine
Illustration
- Time
- 25 minutes
- Researched
- Researched from 89 sources in the brief
Cornmeal cooked in soured cream diluted with water or cream, roughly one part cream to three parts liquid, stirred constantly clockwise with a wooden spoon in a thick-walled pot over low heat for about 30 minutes, to a smooth, rich porridge. Served topped with grated brynza, sheep's-milk cheese, and shkvarky, crisp-fried salo cubes, a shepherd's dish built from what a summer on the high mountain pasture, the polonyna, actually provided.
As tradition built it
Serves 2. About 25 minutes.
Ingredients
- 500 ml sour cream (15 per cent)
- 500 ml cream (20 per cent)
- to taste salt and pepper
- 180 g fine cornmeal
To finish
- 300 g salo, in small cubes
- 100 g brynza
Method
- Whisk the sour cream and cream together in a small pot and set it over a medium heat. Season.
- Sprinkle in the cornmeal gradually, whisking all the time. Keep stirring 5 to 7 minutes once it is all in.
- Take it off the heat, cover and rest 5 minutes.
- Fry the salo in a hot dry pan until golden, for shkvarky.
- Turn the banosh into a bowl, top with the shkvarky and the brynza in pieces, and serve at once.
Notes
The recipe is Ievgen Klopotenko's banosh with brynza and shkvarky. His Carpathian banosh boils a litre of sour cream alone and cooks 140 g of cornmeal in it 7 to 10 minutes. Vitaliy Kachkan, a Hutsul restaurateur in Ivano-Frankivsk, tells Food and Mood the liquid is 60 parts cream to 40 sour cream, the groats a fifth of the whole, stirred clockwise with a wooden spoon over an open fire. Kateryna Pulatova's UNIAN version uses milk and water and cooks it 25 to 30 minutes.
What a modern chef changes
Toasted, water-bathed and passed through a chinois
Rung 4
Method
- Toast the cornmeal dry in the pot before the cream goes in, deepening its flavour beyond what the traditional method draws out.
- Cook the porridge in a water bath rather than direct low heat, holding it at a precise, gentle temperature to avoid any risk of catching, then finish it in a high-power blender for a silken, fully smooth texture entirely unlike the traditionally coarser porridge, passed through a chinois.
- Serve the brynza as a quenelle rather than grated.
- Finish with shkvarky rendered from cold-smoked salo per rung four, for a smokier, more structured garnish than the plain fried cubes.