Pastry & pies
Pitulici
Rounds of yeasted dough fried in oil, eaten hot for breakfast with white cheese and soured milk.
Recipe from Туѓино Јабано
- Prep
- 1 hr 30 min
- Cook
- 25 min
- Total
- 1 hr 55 min
- Fasting
- Not suitable
Ingredients 8 ingredients
Method
- Crumble the yeast into the lukewarm milk with the sugar and leave it for 15 minutes, until the surface is foaming.
- Beat in the egg, the two spoons of oil and the salt, then work in the flour a handful at a time until the dough gathers into a ball.
- Knead for about ten minutes. Stop while the dough is still soft and a little tacky — a firm dough fries into something closer to a bread roll.
- Cover the bowl and leave it somewhere warm for an hour, until doubled.
- Pull off pieces the size of a small egg, flatten each one between oiled palms to about a centimetre thick and lay them on a floured cloth.
- Heat 2 cm of oil in a deep pan to 170°C. A scrap of dough should rise and colour in half a minute; if it darkens at once the oil is too hot and the middles will stay raw.
- Fry in batches, two to three minutes a side, turning once, until they are golden and puffed. Drain them on paper.
- Serve them hot, torn open, with crumbled white cheese and a bowl of soured milk.
If you cannot find it
Substitutions that work outside Macedonia.
- Sirenje (white brined cheese)
- Crumbled feta; rinse and drain it if it is very salty.
- Kiselo mleko (soured milk)
- Natural yoghurt, whisked with a fork until it pours.
- Fresh yeast
- 7 g dried yeast, stirred straight into the flour rather than into the milk.
