Extra-Light Baked Flancati for Pust (the rough puff Mardi Gras version!)

Ten years ago, thanks to some Cajun music friends, I made two belated discoveries: Slovenians have a traditional Carnival celebration called Pust. And San Francisco has a small but active Slovenian community, centered on the old Slovenian Hall in the Potrero Hill neighborhood.

I don't know which one was the bigger surprise.

(To learn more about Pust in Slovenia and San Francisco, see Mardi Gras, Slovenian Style: Blood Sausage, Potica, and Polka, my 2012 post about the holiday.)

Traditional Pust dinner with blood sausage, Slovenian Hall, SF

Now, a decade later, I have become a regular at the Slovenian Hall. Especially since I started taking weekly language classes last year.

When Carnival time rolled around last month, I decided to organize an impromptu celebration for our Slovenian class. Traditional foods for Pust include two sweet treats: krofi, or jelly-filled doughnuts; and flancati (sometimes called pohanje), the beignet-like pastry strips my grandma called angel wings. But I wasn't prepared to do any deep fat frying, even in the interest of preserving ethnic food traditions.

Then I thought of the perfect alternative to fried pastries: my baked flancati recipe, adapted from  a Slovenian American cookbook. It had proven to be a dependable stand-in for the fried version I remembered from childhood, with the same fanciful shapes and heavy coating of powdered sugar.

But I had a small problem, this time around. Since this was a last-minute undertaking, I'd had to skip the the usual overnight refrigeration. After just an hour in the fridge, my flancati dough seemed too soft. In trying to correct this, I ended up with a new twist on baked flancati.

Here's what happened: I knew the pastry would become tough if I tried to knead in more floor. So I decided on a more gentle approach. I rolled out the dough on a well-floured board, folded it in half, and re-rolled it. As I worked, I had a hazy recollection of some baking technique I had read about before, but had never actually tried.

Those last-minute flancati turned out just fine. In fact, they were lighter than usual. Still, I wondered how they would be received in my Slovenian class that evening--especially by my teacher and her husband, who had grown up in Slovenia. What would they think of this American shortcut?

My teacher Mia said the flancati made her feel nostalgic. After I confessed that my flancati were baked rather than fried, her husband assured me that he was very familiar with this style of the traditional pastry.

"We call it 'light' flancati," my teacher's husband said. Then he added, "I know how you made it. You had to keep rolling and folding, right?" His eyes twinkled.

How on earth did this distinguished Silicon Valley engineer know about the fine points of pastry making? One thing seemed clear. I had stumbled onto a legitimate Slovenian flancati variation, and not just some American adaptation. In fact, a little research revealed that my "roll and fold" creation was similar to a well-known technique called rough puff (or blitz puff) pastry.

Traditional puff pastry is a laborious process that can take three days. The butter is rolled into a single flat layer and encased in two layers of dough. Multiple rounds of careful rolling, folding, and chilling follow. The end product is a rich dough with anywhere from seventy to seven hundred layers. During baking, steam from the melting butter creates the "puff" that produces those multiple airy layers. 

In the shortcut "rough puff" version, cubes of butter are combined with flour and formed into a rough dough. The butter chunks are flattened during rolling and re-rolling. The result is a rich, flaky pastry with an impressive rise, even if the layers aren't quite as numerous or discrete.

Unlike puff pastry, flancati dough includes eggs and sour cream. But otherwise, I had unwittingly followed the same approach.

Now that I understood what I had been doing, I was eager to make this rough puff version of flancati again.  I had the chance a few weeks later, for another event at the San Francisco's Slovenian Hall.

This time, I made a few changes to maximize the puff. I was careful to leave the butter in visible chunks when I cut it into the flour. I chilled the dough overnight. And I followed a more deliberate folding and rolling technique, described and illustrated below. To bake, I used a slightly higher oven temperature.

The result was the best flancati yet. Even my grandmother would have approved!

Extra-Light Baked Flancati

2 cups flour
1/2 lb butter, unsalted, cut in chunks
2 egg yolks
1/2 cup sour cream
1 T. rum
1 packet vanilla sugar (or 1 t. vanilla extract and 1 t. sugar)
1 t. grated lemon rind or 1/4 t. nutmeg


Place flour in a medium-sized bowl and cut in butter chunks until they are the size of large peas. In a small bowl, mix egg yolks, sour cream, and flavorings of your choice until well blended. Add to the flour-butter mixture. Combine and mix lightly with your hands until a rough dough forms. Bits of butter should still be visible.

Divide dough into four balls. Flatten into thick squares, wrap in plastic, and refrigerate overnight.

When ready to bake, remove one piece of dough at a time from refrigerator.  Let soften until it can be rolled out.

On a floured board, roll out dough into an 8 or 9 inch square--or, if you prefer, a rectangle of similar dimensions.

Fold the dough into overlapping thirds, as though you are folding a letter to place in an envelope.

Flatten slightly with a rolling pin and roll out until you have another rectangle. The pieces of butter will be visible.

Once again, fold into thirds and turn the "letter" a quarter turn to the right.

Roll it out again into a rectangle, fold into thirds, make a quarter turn to the right. For the third and final time, roll out the folded "letter" into a rectangle.

At this point, you will have created twenty-seven layers of dough!

Cut the rectangle into sixteen pieces. Make a slit in the center of each small rectangle. Pull opposite corners part way through the slit. Or pull an entire side through the slit. For more detailed instructions about shaping (with photos), see my original baked flancati post. 

Place flancati on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Repeat with the remaining three pieces of dough. You will need two baking sheets.

Bake at 375 degrees for 10 to 15 minutes, until medium brown.

Remove to racks and sprinkle with confectioner's sugar while still warm.

Enjoy!

Mardi Gras, Slovenian Style: Blood Sausage, Potica, and Polka

I discovered the Slovenian community in San Francisco almost by accident. It might not have happened at all, if I didn't play the Cajun accordion.

One night in February of 2005, my Cajun band was playing at a little club outside San Francisco. It was Mardi Gras season, so we were dressed up for the occasion, in masks and beads.

Some dancer friends told us about an event called a "Pust" at the Slovenian Hall in San Francisco the following weekend. It was Slovenian Mardi Gras, they'd heard. A festive dinner and a polka band. They suggested my fiddler husband and I might like to join them.

Slovenian Mardi Gras? That was complete news to me. I had noticed the Slovenian Hall, a solid square building with a big "for rent" sign clearly visible from the highway, whenever we drove into San Francisco. But I had no idea it was still in operation. I figured it was one of those abandoned ethnic clubs, now just a banquet hall for hire.

My husband and I agreed to meet our friends there. We were too late to get into the dinner, but they let us in for the polka dance. It was a yearly event, we learned, put on as a fundraiser by the Slovene National Benefit Society (SNPJ), one of those old-style ethnic insurance organizations.

We discovered quite a scene. A couple hundred people had just finished dinner and were waiting for the polka band to start playing in the big room with the stage. Our friends led us into a smaller room off to the side, where some accordionists were jamming. It looked like an old-style European tavern, with paintings of Alpine vistas and rural life on the wall. We ordered a drink and soaked it all in. Once the dance started, I even let my friend talk me into dancing a polka.

(Update: Here's a great video of a more recent Pust accordion jam at the bar.)

So we went back the next year—for the Pust dinner, as well as the dance. By now, I had learned more about the Slovenian-style Mardi Gras. It bore a striking resemblance to Mardi Gras celebrations in Louisiana. Not in New Orleans, with those big parades. But more like the country celebrations of the Cajuns and Creoles in the rural communities of Southwest Louisiana. Traditionally, Cajun Mardi Gras is a male scene. Masked men in costumes, heavily lubricated with alcohol, travel around on horseback or in trucks to the neighboring homes and farms. They sing, dance, play music, raise a ruckus, and beg for contributions to the communal gumbo pot.

In Slovenia, I learned, there are rowdy parades of folks dressed up as wild shaggy creatures called kurenti, who do much the same thing. It's Carnival, the one day in the year when everything is turned on its head and the usual rules don't apply. Just like in Louisiana, there seems to be an unsettling mix of menace and good times. These two rural cultures had much in common.

Kurenti, from Wikipedia 

Here's a video of kurenti on parade in Slovenia, from the Slovenian Ethnographic Museum.
And one more, with whips and accordion music.

Now look at this clip of Cajun Mardi Gras, from a well known Louisiana documentary filmmaker.

They could be cousins!

I showed up for our first Pust dinner with high hopes. Maybe there would be wild revelry. But it didn't happen. Just a big, sit-down banquet dinner. Not even a slice of potica. And then a polka band. I wasn't even sure most of the people there were Slovenian.

But it takes time to explore a new community. We went back a few years later, for a wine festival, and discovered the cultural heart of the Slovenian Hall: The Educational and Dramatic Club Slovenia, who had organized the event. There were songs and priestly blessings, all in Slovenian. We met some delightful people, including many born in Slovenia. I was hooked.

We soon became regulars at the Slovenian Hall. And we attended many more events. We helped out in the kitchen. At one event, I was a server in the buffet line and learned a shocking truth: some Slovenians dislike sauerkraut!

As I started to notice the food at these events, I reached a few other conclusions: Festive meals were very heavy on meat, especially pork. Pork roast,  barbecued ribs,  Slovenian sausages, and sometimes chicken appeared often. Potatoes, cabbage, and sauerkraut were the usual side dishes. There was always a green salad, in a tart vinaigrette dressing. And there was always plenty of alcohol: Wine and mixed drinks for sale at the bar. Carafes of red and white wine at the long banquet tables.

Another shock: Dessert didn't always mean potica. Unless, of course, it was a potluck, when there would always be the chance to sample and compare different versions. Eventually, I found enough  courage to bring my own potica to a potluck, and was greatly relieved when it passed muster.

This year's Pust Dinner included roast pork loin, beans, tasty fried potatoes, and sauerkraut, served family style at long buffet tables. But the centerpiece came a little later in the meal.

Blood sausage is a traditional dish at Pust. A small group of people at the Slovenian Hall get together every year to prepare it. At a recent event, an older man who heads up the operation told us that the tradition might be ending this year,  because they couldn't find younger people to continue it. He tried to recruit my husband, who had to decline because the big sausage-making operation happens during the work week.

Blood sausage, I have to admit, holds little appeal for me. When it is offered, I will dutifully sample a piece. It is dark, starchy, and slightly sweet. f you look at recipes, you will discover why.  

Here's the ingredient list for Krvave Klobase from the Progressive Slovene Women of America:

1 medium pork head

1 veal lung

4 T. salt

1 1/2 T pepper

1 t. cinnamon

2 T. marjoram

1/2 t. cloves

2 lbs. parboiled rice

1 quart pork blood

The best part of this year's Pust dinner came at the end. It was potica, with a particularly intriguing filling I had never tasted before. It included nuts, but the flavor and texture seemed different. It had a strong taste of lemon.

Later on, I met the young woman from Fontana whose family had catered the event. She seemed pleased when I complimented her on the potica. She recited a long list of ingredients, which included lemon and vanilla. So I had guessed right. Not quite like the traditional version of potica my family makes, but tasty just the same.