Pastry & pies
Mekici
Fried yeasted dough for breakfast, with white cheese or jam — what the house smells of on a Sunday morning.
Recipe from Туѓино Јабано
- Prep
- 1 hr 30 min
- Cook
- 20 min
- Total
- 1 hr 50 min
- Fasting
- Not suitable
Ingredients 9 ingredients
Method
- Dissolve the yeast and sugar in the warm milk and leave it ten minutes until a foam rises. If it does not rise, the yeast is dead and there is no point going on.
- Add the yoghurt, egg, oil and salt, then the flour a little at a time. The dough should be soft and sticky — softer than feels right.
- Work it by hand or spoon for ten minutes, cover it and leave it somewhere warm for an hour, until doubled.
- Heat oil about three fingers deep in a deep pan to 175 °C. With no thermometer, drop in a scrap of dough: it should surface within two or three seconds.
- With oiled hands tear off pieces of dough, stretch them into ragged rounds and lower them into the oil. Do not stretch the middle too thin — that is where they burn first.
- Fry for 1–2 minutes a side until puffed and browned. Lift them onto a rack.
- Serve hot, with crumbled white cheese, jam or honey. Mekici do not wait — half an hour on, they are not the same thing.
If you cannot find it
Substitutions that work outside Macedonia.
- White cheese
- Feta rinsed and crumbled, or urda with a pinch of salt.
- Yoghurt
- Kefir or buttermilk; the dough will be a little looser.
- Dried yeast
- 20 g fresh yeast, slaked in the warm milk the same way.
