Kurabye Greek. Greek Kurabye Lenten Kurabye. Cooking recipe

Winter kaleidoscope 28.01.2019

Dear readers, our blog competition is coming to an end. Let me remind you that it runs until January 27, 2019. And I publish the latest competition articles. We'll sum it up soon. Stay tuned for more news.

Today with us is Elena Meteleva from Greece. We meet her article, which participates in the “New Year and Christmas Delicacies” nomination. This is her second competition article. The first article received a huge response. And today Lena will tell us about how kurabiye is prepared in Greece. I give the floor to Lena.

Dear readers, we continue to join in the Greek holidays. As I promised earlier, in this article I will tell you about other traditional Greek delicacies. Let's start with the recipe for New Year's kurabye.

For some reason, they are also baked only during the Christmas and New Year holidays. At other times of the year, these cookies are rarely seen anywhere. It is no less aromatic than melomacarona, but in its own way.

Recipe for Greek kourabye (Κουραμπιέδες)

For the test we will need:

• 250 gr. butter,
• 150 ml. vegetable oil (any kind, I use our olive oil),
• 150 gr. almonds,
• 2 doses of vanilla powder,
• 1 stack powdered sugar,
• 50 ml. Ouzo (Greek aperitif)
• 1 tsp. soda without a slide,
• About 1 kg soft flour,
• Powdered sugar at the end for dusting.

Remove the butter from the refrigerator in advance to warm and soften. Then mash it with a spoon and start pouring in the vegetable oil, whisking the mass with a whisk or mixer until smooth.

Brown the almonds in the oven at 160 degrees. It is enough if it turns golden; there is no need to fry it too much. Then chop or mash into large pieces.

Add vanilla powdered sugar, a shot of ouzo and soda mixed in a small amount of water to the oily substance.

Then everyone will scream - where can I get you ouzo and what is it anyway? Ouzo is a Greek grape aperitif with the aroma of sweet anise. It adds freshness and sophistication to the aroma of the cookies. If someone is worried about alcohol, it will evaporate, leaving only the aroma. But if you don’t have ouzo, you can take some kind of strong liqueur or just cognac; mastic liqueur or tincture works well.

Gradually add pre-sifted flour to the butter mixture and knead into a soft dough. Lastly, add the roasted almonds.

Then everything is quite simple. Bring the oven to 180 degrees. Place the cookies on a sheet or baking sheet covered with baking paper. You can simply sculpt it with your hands, making small balls. Or simply roll out the dough to about 1 cm and cut out the kurabiye with any mold, traditionally it is a crescent, I once made stars and other figures.

Bake for about 20 minutes, until light golden brown. You can check the readiness of kurabye very easily. Remove one cookie and break it in half with a fork. When it is ready, it gives in easily and will crumble.

After baking, leave the cookies to cool slightly. Before rolling kurabye in powdered sugar, Greek housewives sprinkle the cookies with rose water; it is specially sold in supermarkets. I don't do that. It’s convenient to put powdered sugar in a bag, adding a little vanilla, and “bathe” 2-3 cookies in the powder. This way it is evenly covered with powder.

Then beautifully place the kurabye on a plate and it will create a festive mood in your home! And there will always be something to treat guests for tea.

Once upon a time, our relatives, after slaughtering a pig, would give us a jar or two of melted fat. I must say that it perfectly replaced butter in the kurabiye recipe! The feather had a different aroma, but no one guessed what it was.

Lenten kurabe. Cooking recipe

And now the recipe for Lenten kurabye.

• 250 ml vegetable oil,
• half a glass of red wine,
• 5 tbsp. Sahara,
• zest of 1 lemon,
• 0.5 kg. flour with baking powder,
• 1 tsp cinnamon, 1 vanilla,
• Turkish delight a few pieces
• powdered sugar for sprinkling.

Sift the flour into a bowl. In another container, mix butter, sugar, zest, wine, spices. My mixture of olive oil, spices and red semi-sweet gave off such an aroma that I understood why my niece calls these cookies “monastic”.

Gradually add flour and knead the dough until it sticks well.

Turkish delight is a sweet similar to marmalade covered in powdered sugar. In Greece there is a wide variety of its tastes, you can take any. But if you don’t have Turkish delight, it’s okay - take thick jam, or you can stuff the chicken with almonds or raisins to your taste.

Insert pieces of Turkish delight into the middle of the cookies and form into a ball. Bake in the same way as in the previous recipe, and sprinkle with powdered sugar in the same way.

Finally, a recipe for the Greek holiday pie Vasilopita.

Holiday pie Vasilopita

Actually, this is almost an ordinary cupcake and there are a million recipes for vasilopita. But it is always round in shape, lush and very tasty, and in Greece they do not celebrate the New Year without it.

I am giving the recipe as an example; this year I baked vasilopita exactly according to it.

• 300 grams of butter,
• 400 gr. Sahara,
• 3 eggs
• 150 ml. orange juice,
• 150 ml. milk,
• 350 gr. flour,
• 100 gr. chopped almonds,
• 50 gr. mashed walnuts,
• 20 gr. lemon zest,
• 20 gr. orange zest,
• 20 gr. baking powder,
• 2 gr. salt,
• 25 ml Amaretto liqueur.

Preparing vasilopita

Sift the flour into a bowl and mix it with the bulk ingredients - nuts, zest, salt, baking powder.

Using a mixer, beat the softened butter and sugar. While continuing to beat, add the eggs one at a time. Then pour in the milk and juice, and then gradually add the flour. At the end, pour the liqueur into the resulting mixture and beat a little more.

Pour the dough into a prepared pan with a diameter of about 26 cm. Bake in an oven preheated to 150 degrees for about an hour.

To make the cake a vasilopita, 35-40 minutes after the start of baking, take out the cake and put a flury in it - a lucky coin wrapped in foil. If you do this at the beginning, the coin will settle to the bottom.

The finished pie should be left to cool and then decorated to your liking. I had the chocolate frosting ready and some leftover almonds to use for 2019.

On New Year's Eve, by 12 o'clock everything in a Greek house has already been eaten, and everyone is waiting for midnight. At exactly 12, the lights in the house are turned off for a minute, and then they congratulate each other on the New Year, hugging and kissing. On the street we can hear the sounds of fireworks - one of the neighbors will definitely set off funny lights.

After this, the owner of the house traditionally cuts the pie, having first made a cross on it with a knife. The first cut piece is for Christ and the Mother of God, then for the house and fields, then for the owner of the house, the hostess, the children and, in turn, all the guests. Anyone who finds flury in their piece will be lucky for the next year!

Hello my frozen friends!

How do you warm up?

We hide under an electric blanket, put on an interesting movie and drink gallons of tea.

Today it’s the turn of the last released James Bourne. And if it weren’t for our family’s newly-favorite Hollywood star Alicia Vikander, I wouldn’t have seen my beloved Matt Damon as my own ears.

Once again we have snowfall and a blizzard here, which means it’s time to bake cozy, winter, snow-white kurabye cookies for tea.

But I want to disappoint you right away. Greek kurabiye looks not at all the way you are used to seeing him. And the taste, naturally, is also not at all what you knew before.

What you are used to seeing on the shelves is the so-called Baku variety of kurabiye. And at the origins there was a slightly different interpretation of it.

How is Greek kurabiye different?

The Greeks consider kurabie their traditional national cookie, which is usually prepared before Christmas (December 25) in huge quantities, and stored until Epiphany, which is celebrated here on January 6. These same cookies are often treated to caroling children.

But like the vast majority of Greek sweets, kurabie cookies have eastern origin. They say that the roots of this New Year's dessert go back to Persia.

However, it became famous during the Ottoman Empire back in the 15th century. Classic kurabiye is prepared with almond flour, but the secret of Greek kurabiye, as well as the Baku one, is very well whipped butter with powdered sugar. Thanks to this, the texture of the correct kurabiye is crumbly, but very delicate and airy: The cookies literally melt in your mouth.

In fact, to prepare kurabiye in its Greek interpretation, the classic proportion for shortcrust pastry is used: 1 part sugar, 2 parts fat and 3 parts flour.

But distinctive feature of the Greek kurabiye is sheep's milk, which is part of the butter, as well as many large pieces of toasted almonds.

Moreover, it is melted butter that is put into the kurabia. This also gives the cookies a unique flavor.

It is these 2 components that make kurabi such a beloved and unique holiday treat.

I think it will be difficult for you to find sheep oil, and not everyone will like its taste. So I'll give you simplified version of classic cookies, and I’ll bake kurabiye from ghee with the addition of sheep’s milk. I myself like this unusual option much better. The taste is absolutely unique.

Step by step recipe

Required Products:

• butter (can be melted), from the refrigerator - 150 g.
• powdered sugar - 55 gr.
• flour - 300 gr.
• baking powder - ¼ tsp.
• vanillin or vanilla essence - ½ tsp.
• rum or cognac - 10 gr.
• almonds or chocolate (optional) - 60 gr.

Preparation:

Personally, I like the classic version with almonds and powder. And my husband said that kurabiye with chocolate was the best kurabiye he had ever tried. So, do both and choose for yourself.

See you again with delicious recipes.

Good luck, love and patience.

Kurabye cookies are usually baked in Greece for the New Year and Christmas, which is celebrated there on December 25th. It is customary to sprinkle it generously with powdered sugar so that in a box or on a holiday plate these cookies look just like under a snow-white blanket of sugar.

Please do not confuse it with Turkish kurabie cookies. Their names are similar, but they are baked according to different recipes and for different occasions.

Adviсe:

• It is better to prepare and chop the almonds in advance; this is the longest process in preparing these cookies. Or if it is possible to buy it immediately ground, but not;
• Remove the butter from the refrigerator in advance so that it is at room temperature;
• If you want to “cover” the cookies with a blanket of sugar, it is better to prepare 2 cups of powdered sugar.

	Kurabiedes recipe with photos
	First you need to prepare the almonds. To do this, pour 200 grams of almonds with boiling water, keep it for 5 minutes and peel it
	Place the peeled almonds on paper towels and let dry. You can dry it for 5 minutes in a hot oven. You can just wait until it dries on its own.
	Dried almonds must be chopped in a blender.
	Grind the butter with a glass of powdered sugar and beat.
	Separate the yolk from the white and add the yolk while whisking the butter.
	Add flour, chopped almonds, vanilla sugar, baking powder and mix the dough well.
	Roll the dough into a sausage 3-4 cm wide, cut into pieces of the same length and roll each piece into a ball. Press a whole almond into the center of the ball.
	Either grease a baking tray or use parchment paper and place the cookies at a distance of about 3 cm from each other. Place in a baking tray preheated to 180 degrees. Bake for 15-20 minutes
	Remove, cool, sprinkle with powdered sugar.

When we were on vacation in Greece, we brought a box of kurabiye. Insanely delicious, like all the sweets we bought there. I have never eaten such delicious Turkish delight anywhere else. So, we liked the kurabi so much that I started looking for a recipe. They were all kind of strange. Judging by the composition, it was already clear that it was not right. One, however, I decided to try. I ended up with a huge amount of sugar and had to adjust it. It turned out similar. Not exactly what we bought, but very close (perhaps due to the fact that my almonds were not very finely ground). I will experiment more, I want something that is ideally close.

Products:

butter 210 g
powdered sugar 180 g
egg yolk 1 pc.
cognac 1 tbsp. l.
flour 350 g
almonds 50 g
baking powder 0.5 tsp.
orange tincture
powdered sugar for dusting

Preparation:

Grind the almonds until crumbly.

Beat butter with powdered sugar.

Add the yolk, beat.

Pour in cognac, beat until smooth and fluffy.

Mix half the flour with almond crumbs and baking powder. Combine the flour mixture with the butter mixture, knead the dough, adding the rest of the flour until the dough stops sticking to your hands.

Cover a baking sheet with parchment and place balls of dough the size of a walnut (15g).

Bake at 180* for 20-25 minutes.

Cool the finished cookies completely, sprinkle with orange tincture, and roll in powdered sugar.

No, no, this is not the eastern kurabye, which is sold in Russian bakeries and markets. These are different cookies, much tastier.
Round snow-white cookies, displayed in the bright windows of all Greek grocery stores, without exception, attract the eyes of passers-by. One such “snowdrift” contains as much as 180-200 calories, but it is impossible to resist the temptation and not eat it!

At home, we can easily prepare this New Year's delicacy, lay it out traditionally (similar to the image) and delight our loved ones with it.

Ingredients

• butter - 400 g,
• vegetable margarine - 100 g,
• powdered sugar -100 g,
• 2 yolks and 1 whole egg,
• vanilla powder - 2 pcs.
• nutmeg (powder) - ½ teaspoon,
• cognac - 1/3 cup,
• soda - 1 teaspoon,
• almonds 250 g,
• flour 850 g,
• powdered sugar - up to 1 kg.

Preparation

Beat butter at room temperature with about 100 g of powdered sugar until thick white foam. This is one of the main conditions for preparing delicious kurabye; the longer we beat, the fluffier it will be. To get the best result we will need about 15 minutes.



Add 1 egg and 2 yolks, as well as soda diluted in cognac.





We knead the dough, we knead it with our hands.



Brown the peeled almonds in a frying pan without oil or on a baking sheet on parchment paper in the oven at 160 degrees for 15 minutes. If the almonds are unpeeled, then boil them for 5 minutes in hot water, cool with cold water, now the peel can be removed very easily.



Coarsely chop the almonds and add them to the dough. You can make kurabiye with whole almonds, putting them in each cookie.



Let's make kurabiedes. We tear off a small piece of the dough, knead it in our hands like plasticine and make small balls. Then we press down a little on top so that we get these barrels. You can sculpt kurabiedes in the shape of a crescent.



Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and lay out the kurabi. Bake at 160 degrees for up to 30 minutes.



As soon as the kourabiedes is browned and cracked, it is ready. Remove from the oven and let cool.



Place the first layer of cookies on a large plate, sprinkle generously with powdered sugar, sifting it through a strainer. Then place the next row and sprinkle again. And so every time.



This is what we got.

Advice. Kurabies quickly absorbs moisture, so it must be stored in a closed container.