Kozunak

Name: Kozunak
Total time: 2 h 48 min
Yield: Serves 10
Cuisine: Bulgaria and Romania
Ingredients: 40 g fresh yeast; 1 tbsp sugar; 6 to 8 tbsp warm water; 2 tbsp flour; 5 eggs, at room temperature; 300 g sugar; 1 kg kozunak flour, sifted; a pinch salt; 200 ml fresh milk, warmed; ½ capsule lemon essence; 80 ml sunflower oil, warm; 80 g butter, melted; 1 packet vanilla powder; 1 egg yolk; 1 tbsp milk; a little sugar

Bulgaria

Illustration

Time: 2 hours 48

Bulgaria's sweet Easter bread, and its own debunk: seventeenth-century France, not ancient Bulgaria.

by Bulgaria

Direct evidence for what the Ottoman centuries specifically changed at the level of technique, as opposed to the fact of rule itself, proved genuinely hard to source on the Bulgarian side; most searches returned political rather than culinary history. What can be traced with confidence is dish by dish rather than period by period. Boza, the fermented cereal drink both countries still drink, traces to ancient Mesopotamia and was popularised across the whole Ottoman Balkans; the seventeenth-century Ottoman travel writer Evliya Çelebi recorded roughly a thousand boza-sellers working Istanbul's streets alone. Kozunak, Bulgaria's sweet Easter bread, by contrast, is not ancient and not Ottoman at all: its documented root is seventeenth-century France, a genuine correction against the reflex assumption that anything wearing a plait and a sugar glaze must be old.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves 10. Up to 2½ hours; bakes 15 to 18 minutes, then 25 to 30 covered.

Ingredients

The yeast sponge

40 g fresh yeast
1 tbsp sugar
6 to 8 tbsp warm water
2 tbsp flour

The dough

5 eggs, at room temperature
300 g sugar
1 kg kozunak flour, sifted
a pinch salt
200 ml fresh milk, warmed
½ capsule lemon essence
80 ml sunflower oil, warm
80 g butter, melted
1 packet vanilla powder

The glaze

1 egg yolk
1 tbsp milk
a little sugar

Method

Crumble the yeast into a bowl with the sugar and mash until it liquefies. Add the warm water, sprinkle with the flour, and leave 15 minutes until it foams.
Stir the eggs and sugar in a metal bowl over the heat until they reach 20 degrees.
Sprinkle the flour with the salt. Add the eggs and the yeast, stirring in one direction only.
Pour in the milk a little at a time with the lemon essence, then the oil, half the butter and the vanilla.
Knead to a soft, sticky dough. Brush it with butter, cover, and let it rise not quite fully, 30 to 40 minutes.
Divide it into three, roll them into strands with oiled hands, brush with butter and plait. Set it in a tin and brush with butter.
Let it rise in a cold oven until doubled. Brush with the yolk and milk and sprinkle with sugar.
Bake low in an oven heated to 180°C, 15 to 18 minutes, then cover with foil and bake 25 to 30 more.

Notes

Its documented root is seventeenth-century France, arriving into Bulgarian festive baking rather than descending from it.

The recipe is Ivan Zvezdev's Easter kozunak. Sofia Mel, the Bulgarian miller, uses 650 g of its flour with dry yeast, rises it about 2 hours, plaits a wreath with dried fruit and nuts pressed in, and bakes about 40 minutes at 170°C. Neither fills it with raisins or lokum.

What a modern chef changes

A laminated crumb, a sous vide prove and a honey rose glaze

About 5 hours, including proving

Method

Laminate the enriched dough with cultured butter, a technique borrowed from French viennoiserie, for extra flake within the soft, enriched crumb.
Prove the dough in a sous vide water bath held at a precise 28°C, a more consistent proving chamber than a domestic kitchen's ambient warmth allows.
Brush the finished loaf with a reduced honey and rose syrup glaze rather than a plain egg wash, calling back to the Rose Valley.
Finish with dehydrated citrus zest dusted over the top in place of candied peel.

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