Zur-belish
12 servings
150 minutes
Zur-belish is a national Tatar treasure, one of the most delicious dishes in the world. Translated, its name means "big pie" - but it is not so much a pie as an excellent roast in dough. Yes, and belish should not be confused with belyashi - this is a completely different dish, which is prepared using a completely different technology. Bulat Ibragimov, the chef of the Yuzhane restaurant, tells how to make zur-belish from duck. Instead of duck, you can take another bird - as well as mammal meat.
1
Take a kilogram of flour and add to it 500 grams of room temperature diced butter (so much butter is added to make the dough rich and prevent it from drying out during long cooking). Mix the butter with the flour in a mixer for about 5 minutes until they reach the texture of wet sand. Add a teaspoon of salt and ice water to the dough. Water should be added by eye, just enough to bind the ingredients. Mix the dough again but not for too long, no more than 2 minutes. Long mixing will make the dough elastic, which is not needed. Shape the dough into a hemisphere and refrigerate it for 20 minutes.
- Wheat flour: 1 kg
- Butter: 800 g
- Salt: to taste
2
Meanwhile, prepare the filling. Cut 1.5–2 kilograms of potatoes into large cubes. Although zur-belish is called a pie, it is essentially a stew, and the texture of the potatoes should be felt in it. The belish will be in the oven for 2 hours, and during this time the small pieces of potato will turn into mush, which is not needed at all.
- Potato: 1.5 kg
3
Cut 1.5–2 kilograms of onions into cubes with a 1 cm edge. After 2 hours in the oven, the smell of the onion and the onion itself will almost dissolve, but the juice will remain. Broth is one of the main features of zur-belish.
- Onion: 1.5 kg
4
Cut the duck into large pieces of roughly the same size. Do not remove the bones; they should also impart their aroma to the filling. Start with the back part, separating the legs into drumstick and thigh. Do not discard the tail; it is needed as it contains a lot of fat that will serve well. Then move to the front part: cut off the breast and divide it in half. Cut off the wings. Everything can be done quite roughly; there is no need to strictly follow poultry cutting rules; the main thing is that the pieces are of equal size. Do not throw away fat and skin; everything should be used. That is, all parts of the duck should end up inside the zur-belysh.
- Duck: 1 piece
5
Mix duck pieces, onion, and potatoes. Add salt to taste. The salt should be about 2% of the filling's weight. Then add pepper; a lot of ground black pepper is needed. There are no other spices or seasonings in the belyash except for salt and pepper. Mix the filling well and let it sit to marinate a bit.
- Salt: to taste
- Ground black pepper: to taste
6
Take the dough out of the refrigerator and divide it into two unequal parts. 2/3 of the dough will be for the bottom of the pie, and 1/3 for the top. Roll out the larger piece of dough to a thickness of 1 cm. Why this thickness is needed: the pie takes a long time to cook, and the most delicious part of a belish is the bottom layer of dough; if it's too thin, it will dry out and won't have a juicy crust.
7
Generously grease the baking dish with butter (duck or goose fat can also be used). Spread the dough in the dish to cover both the bottom and the sides. A classic belish is made in a round shape, but the shape doesn't really matter. Add the filling to the dish and top it with small pieces of butter—about 300 grams, for example, but this is a matter of taste.
- Butter: 800 g
8
Roll out the remaining dough. Cover it with the belyash. Carefully cut the dough along the sides of the mold. Pinch the edges of the pie - freely, it doesn't have to be neat, just seal the belyash tightly.
9
Roll a ball from the dough scraps — it will serve as a valve. Make a hole in the middle of the belyash and plug it with this ball. Thanks to the valve, excess steam will escape from the pie; if you don't make this hole, the belyash will puff up in the oven, and that won't be good.
10
Place the belyash in an oven preheated to 160 degrees for 2 hours. At low temperature, the dough will be pale, and at higher temperatures, it will start to burn. Check the pie 40 minutes before the end: it may need to be covered with damp parchment paper to prevent drying out on top. After 2 hours, remove the finished belyash from the oven. Cut off the top part of the dough and divide it into four pieces without removing it. Open the belyash. Distribute the filling into deep plates along with broth. Add pieces of dough to it. Eat by dipping crispy dough into the broth.