127. Samsa (Uzbek recipe)

Lately I've been making meat pies to various national recipes rather often. You may already have tried making perepechi with meat to the Udmurt recipe or zur-balish and peremyachi to the Tatar one. Time for one more popular dish — Uzbek samsa with a filling of spiced onion, chopped meat (usually lamb, but I used chicken) and fat-tail fat.

The recipe for real puff-pastry samsa is a little more complicated — the dough is kept in the cold for longer and less water goes into it. But my way of making the dough for samsa doesn't differ much from the original recipe, so let's get started.

Cooking time ≈ 1.5 hours.

Ingredients:

• 4 glasses of wheat flour
• 200 g fat-tail fat
• 800 g lamb or chicken
• 700 g onion
• salt, ground black and red pepper, spices — to taste

First let's make the dough. The dough for home-made samsa should be very stiff, roughly as for pelmeni. Dissolve a couple of spoonfuls of salt in two glasses of water and gradually work the water into the flour. If the dough is still sticky once all the water has gone in, add more flour (some recipes take five glasses of flour to half a glass of water). Cut 50 grams of fat-tail fat into small cubes and render the fat out of it in a hot frying pan. Work the rendered fat into the dough, knead it thoroughly, then roll the dough into a ball and put it in the fridge for half an hour.

Cut the meat into small cubes.

Chop the rest of the fat too.

Mix the meat, the fat and the chopped onion. Pepper it, salt it and add the spices.

Divide the dough into small equal pieces and roll them out into rounds 2–3 mm thick. Try to roll them so that the dough is thinner at the edges than in the middle.

Put the filling in the middle of each round. It's better to fill all the rounds at once, so that no filling is left over.

Wet the edges of the dough lightly with water and seal them into a triangle with the corners folded towards the middle. The samsa must be sealed tight so that the juices don't run out while it bakes.

Preheat the oven to 250°C. Grease a baking tray with vegetable oil and put the samsa on it seam down. Brush the tops of the samsa with vegetable oil too and sprinkle them with water.

Bake in the oven until golden brown (about 30 minutes). Samsa is served hot and eaten with broth, sour cream and various sauces.

Bon appétit!

P.S
Puff-pastry samsa isn't only made with meat. Uzbek recipes sometimes include samsa with cheese — it's made with hard cheeses to exactly the same recipe. It just needs less time in the oven ;).