Buckwheat Breakfast Crumbles: Slovenian Fusion

It was Tuesday morning, time for breakfast, when I had a sudden brainstorm. There was half a bag of buckwheat flour in the cupboard, left over from last Tuesday's near-disaster with the žganci.  Why not whip up a batch of šmoren, substituting buckwheat flour for wheat?

I used soy milk, standard fare at our house, because that's all I had.  But it was a good match for the buckwheat, which turns out to be a particularly healthy food: high in protein, not technically a grain, and gluten free. Oil instead of butter was also an easy choice.

And there it was: Slovenian health food. Gluten-free, dairy-free, and vegetarian. A marriage of sweet šmoren and tangy žganci.  I had finally produced those little crumbles that had eluded me last week!

My new dish even tasted good, with the earthy, slightly sharp taste of buckwheat pancakes.  I topped it with a sprinkle of  brown sugar and served it with a side of organic Italian marmalade, blueberries, and nonfat Greek yogurt.

2 eggs


6 T. soy milk

2 T. buckwheat flour


2 t. brown sugar


dash of salt (optional)


oil for pan

Mix all the ingredients together until you have a smooth crepe-like batter. Heat a frying pan with a thin film of oil. Pour in the batter. Leave it alone until the mixture starts to brown on the bottom. Then follow the usual procedure for šmoren. Take a spatula and begin to scrape, turn, and chop the mixture until you have a pan of nicely browned little crumbles.   Serves 2.

Žganci: Mysteries of Buckwheat

Žganci is one of a handful of quintessentially Slovenian dishes.  There is an entire page devoted to it on a government website:  Žganci, Always and Forever. 

But it's hard to classify.

The Progessive Slovene Women of America call it buckwheat mush (ajdovi žganci) and include it in the "Bread-Biscuits-Mush" section of Treasured Slovenian and International Recipes.  The American Slovene Club, in Our Favorite Recipes, classifies it as a potato substitute, and refer to it as buckwheat crumbles.  Woman's Glory puts it in the catch-all "Varieties" category.

The recipes left me feeling even more confused.  The ingredients were simple, just buckwheat flour and salt water, in a 1:2 ratio. My three vintage cookbooks, as well as the many recipes on the web, all offered virtually identical (and peculiar) instructions.

To make žganci, you boil the salted water and then add the buckwheat flour. Some say you add it gradually, while you slowly stir.  Others suggest you just dump it in all it once.  But they all agree on one key point:  Once the flour is added, you stop stirring.  The Progressive Slovene women shout it out: DO NOT MIX.

You let the mix boil while the flour magically turns into a giant lump.  Then you make a hole in the center of the cake of flour with the handle of a wooden spoon so the water can cook it from the inside.  The water should bubble up over the lump.  Then you cover the pan and let it cook for 15 minutes (or maybe 45?)   Finally, you pour off half the water and stir in the rest.   Pour melted butter on top.  Cover and let sit.

Most sources suggest that you pick up spoonfuls of the big buckwheat cake  and use a fork to flake off crumbles, which should be "piled fluffily"  into a bowl.

I made a small recipe: 


2 c. water 
pinch of salt
1 c. buckwheat flour


I brought the salted water to a brisk boil and slowly poured in the flour.  Then I watched and waited.  To my great surprise, the flour did start to cohere into a large brown lump: 

Boiling Buckwheat Flour

After about 5 minutes, I nudged the lump with a spoon.  It seemed fairly solid.  So I poked a hole in the center of the mass with the handle of a wooden spoon.  Now it looked like this: 

Buckwheat Volcano

As I continued to watch, I began to worry.  There wasn't enough water to cover the top of the lump.  So I added more water.  Oh-oh.  Now it stopped boiling.  I started to worry that the lump was beginning to dissolve.  What if I was left with a pot of boiling mush?

The lump still felt firm.  I gently stuck in a knife, to see if the inside was cooked.  To my horror, I discovered that the firm exterior encased a ball of raw, uncooked flour!

At that point, I panicked.  Something had gone terribly wrong.  I figured the only way to salvage this mess was to turn it into a polenta. I took a fork and beat it into submission.

To my amazement, the brown soup and the raw flour mass was easily transformed into a nice, smooth polenta!

I poured it into a dish, which my husband had greased with olive oil.  I stuck it into the oven to firm up.  topped it off with two nice thick slices of bacon, cooked to a crisp in the microwave.  It looked like this:

The Final Version: Žganci with Bacon

The verdict:  Delicious!  A dark, tangy polenta that provided a fine accompaniment to the chicken ajmoht in my third week dinner.   An added plus:  Buckwheat is high protein and gluten-free!


And when I checked back, I discovered that I had done exactly what the Progressive Slovene Women had intended.  None of those little crumbles for them.  The goal was just a nice smooth mush.
Evidently,  I had simply made a regional variation, in what's called the softer Styrian style.

As they say on that government website: "Any day is right for žganci!  You know, to keep you strong." 

Slovenian Dinner Week 3: A Tasty Roux and a Buckwheat Volcano

Menu

Chicken Ajmoht (Obara)

Buckwheat Žganci with Bacon

Green Salad

After a couple of successful Slovenian meals, I had begun to feel confident. True, I had started out with the familiar.  Stuffed cabbage.  Jelly rolls, otherwise known as palačinke. Then, that little side trip into šmoren.  So far, so good.

It was time to branch out into less familiar territory.

Except it wasn't as unfamiliar as I thought, because it revolved around a core element in a cuisine I had come to know well.  Roux.  The foundation of Louisiana French cooking.  I'd been immersed in that culture since I fell in love with the Cajun accordion, twenty years earlier.

Roux is simple enough:  Flour browned in fat, used as a base for thickening sauce or gravy. But a Louisiana roux is something else.  Cooked long and slow, with constant stirring, it can take an hour until it turns the requisite dark brown.  Roux gives that special rich zest to Cajun and Creole favorites like gumbo, along with so many other dishes.  

There is even a popular Cajun cookbook: Who's Your Mama, Are You Catholic and Can You Make a Roux?  

But it wasn't just the Cajuns and Creoles of Louisiana who had figured out the magical powers of roux.  My Slovenian forbears were also in on the secret. Who knew?

Well, my mother knew, as it turned out.

She had started to talk about a veal soup her mother used to make.  "Aye-macht" is what she thought it was called.  When I started to browse through my vintage cookbooks, I came across something called "ajmoht."  It seemed to be a cross between a soup and a stew.  The key element was something called ajprem, or roux.  It turned up everywhere.  Stews. Vegetable dishes. Cucumber gravy. There was even a soup that seemed to be nothing but water and roux.

So I found a dish that looked easy.  A sort of chicken ragout made with roux.  Maybe a very simple version of the Cajun chicken and sausage gumbo my husband had learned to make so well. 

To accompany it, I decided to try something that was supposed to be a uniquely Slovenian dish.  It was a sort of buckwheat dumpling. Or maybe it a kind of polenta.  The preparation seemed a little. . . unusual.  So was the name, at least if you don't speak Slovenian.

Žganci.  Pronounced "zhe-gahn-see."  At least I think so.

Buckwheat volcano would be more like it.  That žganci would turn out to be my biggest challenge so far.