Bleki, Slovenia's Favorite Noodle

Bleki are nothing more than homemade pasta or egg noodles, cut into square or rectangular shapes.

I discovered bleki in the course of tracking down my grandmother's Mystery Soup, which turned out to be the Slovenian take on pasta fazool, or pasta and bean soup.  But evidently the pasta had the starring role, at least in my mother's family, since she referred to the soup simply as "black-eh."

In fact, bleki have an oddly exalted status in Slovenian cooking.  An entry on the official Slovenian Tourist Board website describes this "simple dish"  as a "special treat." Bleki were associated with special occasions in rural life, like finishing up the harvest or picking grapes.  A recent cookbook by a Slovenian academician and cooking expert describes it as a "high dish," often served with a cream sauce and pancetta.

To make the bleki for the pašta fažul, I used the dough I had used in the previous week's rezanci.  It's a simple recipe:

2 eggs
1 1/4 c. flour
1/4 t. salt

Mix and knead, adding a little water if needed.  Cover and let rest 15 minutes.  Roll out thinly.

Here is where plain old noodles become bleki:  Cut the dough into squares or rectangles.  I aimed for  2 cm x 3 cm rectangles, but if you look at the photo below, you will see that those shapes varied in size.

Let the pasta squares dry on a dishcloth for an hour.  Cook in boiling salted water until done.  Not long, in other words.  Drain and use as you will.


That's it!

Homemade noodles and pasta are delicious, no question about it.  Not to mention a little labor intensive.

So what is so special about bleki?  Just the shape?

It took me awhile to figure it out.  Yes, it has to be the shape.  Standard noodles or rezanci are quicker to make, and it is easier to create uniform sizes.  You just roll up multiple layers of dough and slice. At least that's the theory.  I had a problem with the layers of noodles sticking together.

Blecki, on the other hand, take more time and a better eye:

So far, I have use bleki just one way, in soup.  But I'm ready to branch out.  Next time, I'll try it with one of those creamy pancetta sauces.  But I'll wait for a special occasion to make bleki the centerpiece of the meal.  

Week 12: Mystery Bean Soup

I was hot on the trail of my grandmother's Mystery Soup.

It was a food recollection that surfaced a few years ago.  My mother remembered a special thick bean soup my grandmother used to bring to her, in the early years of her marriage.  No one had a car, so Grandma had to take the bus to deliver it. The name sounded like "black-y" with an exaggerated Slovenian accent.

I could picture it so clearly.  My grandma on the bus, in a housedress.  Week after week, carrying a big  jar of her precious homemade soup to the young married couple.  I figured it must be a thick dark porridge, something like black bean soup.

I kept looking through my Slovenian cookbooks, but I couldn't find a soup that matched the name or the description.

"You're sure that's what it was called?"  I asked my mother.

Yes.  She kept repeating the name, with growing insistence.  Now it sounded more like "blahk-eh."

"It was made with black beans, right?"

No. I had guessed wrong.  They used Roman beans.  Big, speckled and pink.

Pink?

I was wrong about one more detail.  It wasn't my sweet, long-suffering Grandma who delivered the soup.  It was my surly grandfather.  And he did it just once.

So much for the family legend. But I still wanted to find that soup.

I started plugging alternative spellings for "black-eh" into search engines, along with "soup".

Finally, I got a possible hit.  Bleki.  But it referred to a square-shaped noodle or pasta.  Sometimes served on its own, but also used in soup.

Like bean and pasta soup?  I had come across a number of recipes for that dish during my online search,  using unspecified pasta or noodles.

In Slovenian, the soup is called pašta fižol.

It was hard to believe that the mysterious "black-eh" was a variant of the familiar Italian standard known as "pasta fazool" in America.  But I checked with the source.  My mother.

"So Mom, that soup.  It was made with Roman beans.  And roux?"

"Of course.  Everything had a roux!"

"And did it also have square-shaped pasta ?  I've been reading about these Slovenian noodles called bleki. "

"Yes. That's right.  Only we pronounced it 'bleck-eh.' "

Pašta fižol with bleki.

Mystery solved.

On to figuring out  Slovenian Dinner, Week 12.