What is kutaby and how to prepare them properly at home?

Recently, you can often hear in cafes and restaurants about such an unconventional dish as kutaby. But those people who are well acquainted with the kitchens of other countries, will be able to explain what kutabs are.

What is it?

This dish came from the Azerbaijani cuisine - it is traditional there. This batch looks like small patties with a filling, crescent shaped crescent. If to compare with Russian cuisine, then kutabs look very similar to chebureks, but this is only at first glance.

The filling is usually seasonal. It can contain ingredients such as meat, ripe pumpkin, cheese. Sometimes it is added the seeds of a mature pomegranate, and also prepare kutabs with greens. They are prepared on the same principle - from an unleavened dough, similar to dumplings, and differ only in the filling inside.

Now you understand what kutabs are. Next, consider the general principles of preparation.

The main thing in cooking

When preparing these patties, it is important to properly knead the dough. Prepare it fairly simply, the only condition: it must be insipid. If you cook a dough with the addition of yeast, kutabs will become ordinary Russian chebureks.

For the right test, you need to take:

• 400 g of flour;
• 600 ml of room temperature water;
• A few pinch of salt.

Preparation of the dough

1. Sift flour and mix with salt.
2. Pour in water at room temperature. Stir the dough to a homogeneous consistency.
3. If it did not turn out to be steep enough, then add a little more sifted flour and knead again.
4. Put the dough in a plastic bag and leave for 30 minutes.
5. When the time has expired, the dough is ready. It remains only to roll it out and, adding stuffing, to form kutaby.

To do this, it is necessary to divide the dough into even pieces and roll it out into sheets with a thickness of not more than 1 millimeter. Using any round dish, cut the same circles. At this point, the manipulations with the test are over.

Now you can do the stuffing. To fry kutaby it is necessary in frying or confectionery fat.

They are different

With what kutaby is and how the dough is prepared for them, we sorted it out. Now let's deal with the filling. You can start them almost everything that is at hand.

In summer, the filling can be found even in the garden. And cook excellent kutaby with greens. It turns out a light dietary dish, which is also quite suitable for vegetarians.

For the filling you can take any edible herbs: basil, coriander, parsley, dill, tarragon, sorrel, green onions, tarragon, spinach and others - according to your taste and discretion.

To ensure that the filling is successful, the herbs should be thoroughly washed in running water and dried on a towel. Then you need to sort through them, remove all the thick and hard stems and finely chop, adding a little salt. The filling is ready.

On the rolled up and cut out dough should be put a little prepared filling. Spread it on one half, then wrap the second, protect the edges so that a crescent is obtained.

You can fry kutaby in two ways: deep-fried or in a conventional dry frying pan, without any additives. Serve them with sour cream or kefir.

Meat filling

If you do not like vegetarian dishes, you can prepare hearty kutabs with meat.

For the filling you need to take:

• 200 g mutton (can be replaced with other fatty meat);
• 200 g of beef or veal;
• 200 g of onion;
• Ground spices and salt to taste.

Rinse and dry the meat. Pass through the meat grinder along with the peeled onions. Mix thoroughly, adding salt and spices. You can proceed to the formation of pies. They need to be sculpted the same way as the previous ones. In some cases, you can add pieces of vegetables to the meat filling so that it is less greasy.

Fry them only in boiling oil or fat, so that the meat filling is fully fried.

Cheese filling

Another option for cooking this dish is kutaby with cheese. In this case, they can be made both salty and sweet. It all depends on the type of cheese and additives to it.

For their preparation, any cheese (hard and curd) will suit, and also cottage cheese is quite suitable.

For the filling it is necessary to take any kind of cheese and grind it on a grater (if possible), and curd cheeses can be kneaded with a fork. Adding a little sugar and sour cream to the product, you can prepare excellent pies with a sweet filling, which will please both adults and children. This version of the filling is possible only if the cheese or curd does not contain salt. By the way, you can add a little fruit or berries to the sweet stuffing.

In the case of salted cheeses you can cook these patties with a filling of only one cheese, they will still turn out to be unusually tasty, with a pleasant creamy flavor.

And if you add a little greens to the filling from the chopped cheese (coriander, dill, green onions are perfect for this), you will get kutabs with cheese and greens. Herbs with their indescribable and peculiar smell slightly flavor the taste of cheese.

Let's sum up the results

In this article, we talked about what kutabs are. As it turned out, these are original Azerbaijani pies with a variety of fillings. Prepare them from fresh unleavened dough.

This kind of baking can surprise your family and friends, as well as decorate the festive table.

On the table kutaby better served with butter. You can drink them with milk, black tea or yogurt.

The kutabs are prepared quite easily and simply, and due to the variety of fillings their taste can be completely different. The main thing is not to be afraid to cook and experiment.