Balkan Cevapcici vs. American Burger & Fries: A Sodium Throwdown

Low-sodium cevapcici feast

cevapcici

Big Mac (source: Wikipedia)  

A hamburger on a bun, the all-American fast food?  Or how about the Balkan contender, cevapcici with flatbread?  What should you choose, if you are watching your sodium intake?

The raw materials are the same.  Ground meat and white flour.  Both are relatively inoffensive, salt-wise.

Plain ground meat (whatever the source) does have naturally occurring sodium, but not much: 60-75 mg in a quarter pound, before cooking.  Whatever the problems with meat consumption (and there are many), salt is not one of them.    

Flour has negligible sodium. But bread is usually made with added salt, so it can add up. The typical hamburger bun or a medium pita both contain 200+ mg of sodium.  The count drops to almost 0, if you can find commercially made salt-free pita, or if you follow my salt-free lepinja recipe.  

In theory, a simple meal of grilled meat and plain bread doesn't have to be salt-laden.  But the reality is different. 

First, a reminder: The recommended daily sodium limits are no more than 2300 mg a day. Most adults should aim for 1500 mg.  To be considered low sodium, a meal should be under 450 mg.

Nutritional profiles for fast foods are easy to find.  McDonald's is particularly obliging. They spell it all out here.  

It is pretty shocking.

A McDonald's Big Mac contains 970 mg of sodium.  A large order of fries is 350 mg.  That is practically your entire daily salt quota in a single meal.  What if you skip the fries and have a small side salad? That's just 10 mg of sodium.  Unless you add a packet of low calorie balsamic vinaigrette dressing, which adds an astonishing 470 mg of sodium.

Considering a Big Mac alternative?  There are 1490 mg of sodium in a chicken-bacon wrap or in a bacon, egg and cheese bagel. (Please note: McDonald's is no worse than most other popular fast food chains.  If nothing else, they are transparent.)

So where does all the sodium sneak in?

Salt is often added to the ground meat mixture before cooking, whether the end product is a burger or cevapcici.  When you do the cooking yourself, it is easy enough to leave it out.  And be sure to skip the baking soda, if you are aiming for low sodium cevapcici.

The real difference between the American and the Balkan fast food meal?  It's in the add-ons.   The accompaniments and the side dishes.

  

Burger and Fries (source: Wikipedia)

What goes with cevapcici, besides flatbread?  The little sausages are traditionally served with ajvar, a red pepper relish, either homemade or the commercial variety.  Along with that, there is kajmak, a sort of clotted cream that is hard to find in the United States. Labne or Greek yogurt make good substitutes.  Grilled onions and peppers, along with tart raw vegetable salads, will often round out the meal.  

But consider the American hamburger.  It  arrives with a double helping of starch, a bun and salty French fries.  Then there are the high sodium garnishes: a slice of processed cheese, dill pickle slices, catsup, and perhaps other "special sauces."  If there is coleslaw or a green salad, it is usually saturated with a high sodium dressing.  

The Balkan meal wins, hands down.  It is lower in sodium.  Probably lower in fat and calories.  More flavorful.  And it is real food!

To inspire you, below are some sodium numbers, with the preferred choices in bold.

Na Zdravje!  To your health! 

  

Sodium Counts for Burger and Cevapcici Accompaniments

1 oz slice of American (processed) cheese   396 mg       

1/4 cup Greek yogurt                                   31 mg

1/4 cup kajmak (clotted cream)                   48 mg    

McDonald's Special Sauce                           unknown (but high)

1 T. catsup                                                    150 mg

1 T. ajvar (red pepper relish)                      50 mg    

l hamburger bun                                           200+ mg

1 medium pita                                               200+ mg  

1 salt-free pita                                                 0

                      

1 medium dill pickle                                     560 mg

1 whole cucumber                                       6 mg

McDonald's fries, medium                            270 mg 

McDonald's fries, medium, no salt                  55 mg

  

Grandma's Homemade White Bread: Beli Kruh

My grandmother was famous for her homemade bread.  And not just in her own family, as it turns out.

One of my mother's recent recollections is this one:  My grandmother used to bake bread and distribute the loaves to people in their Slovenian neighborhood in Cleveland.  As a little girl, my mother used to accompany her mother, when she made the rounds.

"She just gave it away?" This puzzled me, because  I knew the family didn't have much money, especially during the Depression.

Yes, my mother assured me.  My grandmother was an open-hearted woman who believed in sharing what she had.  Oh, one more thing.  Somewhere along the line, she got some training as a hairdresser.  So she also used to give free haircuts.

These stories do fit with my own memories of my grandmother's generous spirit.  Still,  I can't help but wonder if there might have been some bartering going on, or if she had a little business on the side.

Grandma's Homemade Bread, as we always called it, was a high point of our regular Sunday afternoon gatherings at the little bungalow she shared with Grandpa.  They co-existed unhappily, my mother eventually revealed.  He was a gruff, unhappy man, who was sometimes violent.  She remained sweet and loving.  Maybe baking was her escape.

My grandmother's bread was made with white flour and baked in standard rectangular bread pans.  She served it still warm from the oven, thickly sliced.  It was brown and crusty on the outside, tender and melting inside.  We slathered it with butter or used it to make ham sandwiches.  Grandma always had multiple loaves ready, enough to feed her four children, their spouses, and the dozen grandchildren who might show up.

It is hard to pinpoint what made Grandma's bread so memorable.  It was moister and sturdier, maybe even coarser, than standard white bread, if my memory is accurate.   She never used recipes.  My mother recently mentioned that she often used potato water.  Perhaps that was the secret.

I wondered if one of my vintage cookbooks might hold the key.  They all had multiple recipes for bread.  "Kruh," in Slovenian.

One recipe in Treasured Slovenian & International Recipes caught my eye.

WHITE BREAD--Beli Kruh.

Beautiful Bread?  That seemed like a good place to start.

Then I remembered.  Beli just means white.  Plain old white bread.

I looked over the recipe.  The ingredients were standard.  White flour and yeast, with a little egg, sugar and shortening.  But the process was complex.  An initial sponge, and then three more risings.  So maybe those Progressive Slovene Women were onto something.  Definitely a recipe to try on a  cooking day when I had plenty of time.

The day came on Week 9, when I decided to make cevapcici.  It was one of those rare Tuesdays when I had nothing scheduled and could devote the whole day to my cooking experiments.

I  did wonder whether a conventional loaf of white bread would be the best choice for this particular dinner.  Cevapcici are traditionally served with flatbread: pita, or a slightly thicker and larger Serbian variant called lepinje.  But I figured the same dough might work for both.

So it was settled.  I would follow the Progressive Slovene Women's recipe for Beli Kruh, which yields 2 loaves.  Or, in this case, one extra-large loaf of the standard variety and one smaller flatbread.

1 package yeast
1 c. lukewarm water
1 c. sifted white flour (I used bread flour)
1 egg, beaten
2 T. sugar

5-6 c. additional white flour, sifted  (I needed just 4 3/4 c.)
1 T. melted butter (original called for lard)
1 c. lukewarm water
2 t. salt

Mix the first five ingredients to make a sponge.  Let rise in a warm place until doubled in size.  Add remaining ingredients, adding up to 6 c. additional flour to make a firm dough. Mix well and knead until smooth.  Put dough in an oiled bowl and let rise in a warm place until doubled in size.  Punch down and let rise for a second time until doubled.  Form into 2 loaves and put in greased bread pans.  Or make one smaller flatbread, about 1/2 inch thick, and place on a baking sheet.  Let loaves rise for the third time.  Bake at 325 degrees for one hour for a standard loaf,  less time for flatbread. Brush with melted butter during baking.  Let cool before eating, if you can resist.

The verdict: Mixed.  Of course, I was measuring my results against a fantasy, so I may not be the best judge.

The yeast was definitely active.  The bread rose, maybe even a little too much.  The texture seemed uneven, with holes here and there.  The flavor was fine.

A confession:   My bread making skills have become a little rusty.  I used to bake bread more often, until I discovered a problem:  If you bake your own,  you eat more than you should.

So I made some mistakes.

The biggest one: we store our flour in the freezer.  It needed more time to reach room temperature.  I compounded the problem by adding too much flour all at once.  I suspected right away that I had overdone it, since I had some difficulty kneading it in.   Even though I ended up using considerably less than the six cups of flour the recipe calls for, it still may have been too much.  Lesson learned.

We had the flatbread with the cevapcici.  It was probably a little too thick, or perhaps the dough rose too much.  No pocket, either.

If you are serious about making flatbread, find a recipe for Bosnian or Serbian lepinje, like this one. The foundation seems to be a plainer yeast dough, without egg or sugar.  A flat round loaf, about 1/2 inch thick, is allowed to rise briefly and then baked at a higher initial temperature, so the bread will form a pocket.

That big, standard loaf of white bread lasted a long time.  I used a few slices the following week, when I made struklji, a boiled rolled dumpling with a bread-and-egg filling.  My husband made bread pudding and croutons. Even though we kept it in the refrigerator, the last bit of the loaf got moldy and had to be discarded.

Maybe my grandmother really had figured out the secret of successful bread making.

Bread is meant to be shared.  You need a big extended family or a whole neighborhood to enjoy the fruits of your labors.

I'll remember that next time.  And maybe I'll add a little potato water.

Slovenian Dinner Week 9: Memories of Cevapcici

Menu
Cevapcici 
Ajvar and Thick Yogurt or Kajmak
Homemade White Bread (Beli Kruh) or Pita (Lepinje)
Braised Kale with Peas


Cevapcici (chuh-VAP-chee-chee) are a wildly popular street food in the Balkans.

It’s a simple dish, in theory. A mixture of ground meats, seasoned and rolled into little sausage shapes, and then grilled.  The dish probably originated in Turkey. The name, according to some sources, means "little kebabs."

These days, you can find cevapcici in many cities in America, if you look in the right neighborhoods.

I first tasted cevapcici in Bosnia, in the spring of  2006.

I was sitting with my husband and my in-laws at an outdoor cafe on the cobbled streets of the Old City of Mostar.  We had just crossed the famous old bridge, Stari Most, built by the Ottomans in the 16th century.  It had been destroyed during the Balkan wars of the 1990s and then rebuilt, to much international fanfare, in 2004.

We had walked over the graceful arch and stopped to watched the young men dive into the river for tips.  We browsed in the open air market.  I hadn't yet been to the Middle East, but that's what it felt like.

That day, for the first time in my life, I heard a muezzin's call.  In the space of ten minutes, I saw a mosque, a Serbian Orthodox church, a Roman Catholic church, and an old Jewish synagogue.  So close together.  And now so far apart.

Our tour guide was a beautiful, articulate young woman.  Mostar used to be a cosmopolitan city, she told us.  Her family, like so many others, included many mixed marriages.  People got along, most of the time.  She was close to tears, as she told us about her lost city.   Restored but now divided.

We were at the midpoint of our first trip to Eastern Europe.  We had started in Vienna, spent two wonderful days in Slovenia, and then moved on to Croatia.  But now,  here in Mostar, I understood the failed Yugoslav experiment in a deeper way.  I had a fuller vision of the Balkans, with all the richness and the sadness.

The details of that first taste of cevapcici are hard to recall.  I was trying to absorb so much, and food was the least of it.  But I think it was like this: Charred, spicy meat. Fresh pita.  Raw onions and the red pepper relish I would later learn to call by its proper name, ajvar. The sweet, cool relief of thickened yogurt.



Now, six years later, I had this crazy thought:  why not make cevapcici myself, as part of my Slovenian cooking project?  I knew the dish was popular in Slovenia, at least these days.  But then I reminded myself: I had to follow my own rules. I would stick to recipes from my 1950s ethnic cookbooks.

I didn't expect to find cevapcici recipes in my vintage cookbook collection.  The American Slovenian community in the 1950s would have been too insular, I figured, to know anything about a Serbian-Bosnian dish.  But I checked my cookbooks to be sure.  To my surprise, I found two recipes for cevapcici.  A little digging turned up a history that goes back to the 1930s, when cevapcici appeared on one of Slovenia's first outdoor food trucks.  The vendor hailed from Serbia.

So now I had a plan for my Week Nine dinner: Cevapcici and Homemade Bread.

There are as many approaches to cevapcici as there are cooks. I began with the simple version offered by the Progressive Slovene Women:  a mix of lamb and pork, seasoned with salt and pepper. Contemporary sources suggested livelier seasonings, along with the addition of baking soda or soda water to lighten the meat mix.  So I modified the original Slovenian recipe, while retaining the suggested meat combination.

The meat mixture, just like the seasonings, can vary. That other Slovenian recipe used veal. In Balkan communities with a predominantly Muslim population, like Bosnia and Kosovo, pork would not usually be included, but beef would be a common addition.  Next time, I thought, ground turkey might be worth a try.  (Instead, for my encore version a month later, I used a beef and lamb combination and increased the spices, along with making smaller, thinner shapes.  The result, I think, was closer to the dish's origins.)

The beauty of this dish is that the cook is free to adjust and experiment.

Here is my first version:

1 pound ground lamb
1/2 pound ground pork
1 t. salt
1 t. black pepper
1/2 t. cayenne
1/2 t. paprika
1 large clove garlic, minced
2 T. sparkling water with lime

Mix all the above ingredients lightly. Refrigerate for a half hour to allow flavors to meld. Form into 12 small sausage shapes, about 3/4" by 3".

Grill until nicely charred.  My husband, who did the honors, used his Le Creuset stove top grill pan, which worked beautifully.

Serve with the traditional sides: Raw chopped onion, a red pepper relish called ajvar (AY-var), thickened yogurt, and flat white bread such as pita.  I tried to make homemade bread.  But that's another story!