Sweet and sour meat in Hebrew from Stalik Khankishiev. Jewish sweet and sour roast
There must be meat on the festive table for Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year); What's a holiday without meat? We will cook the meat in a sweet sauce with a slight sourness. Esik fleisch is a medieval dish, the recipe has survived to this day almost unchanged. Sweet and sour meat is a traditional dish of Ashkenazi Jews - European Jews. It was once thought to be a dish for the poor.
Ingredients: beef - 1 kg, onions - 2 pcs., lard - 2 tbsp. l., a piece of honey gingerbread, tomato paste - 2 tbsp., sugar - 2 tbsp. l., citric acid on the tip of a knife, breadcrumbs - 2 tbsp. l., black pepper, bay leaf - 2-3 pcs., salt - 1.5 tsp.
Photo by Stalik Khankishiev
Let's get started.
Cut the meat into small slices, like small chops, no more than 1 cm thick. Finely chop the onion.
Melt lard in a deep frying pan or cauldron over high heat. Fry the onion in lard until golden brown.
Add meat to onions. Stir until the pieces are slightly fried on all sides.
Reduce the heat and cover the pan with a lid: the meat should release juice, the onion should give it a beautiful brown tint and dissolve. Stir occasionally.
Add a little boiling water to the frying pan - so as to cover the meat by 2-3 centimeters, add a bay leaf, stir and leave to simmer for an hour, covered, over very low heat. Add water as needed - the meat should be covered with sauce.
Dried fruits – prunes and raisins – are often added to esik fleisch. This gives a very interesting flavor, but not everyone loves it. I prefer to do without fruit. If you want to try it, now is the time to add them - a dozen prunes and a handful of raisins.
After an hour, increase the heat to medium and discard the bay leaf. Add tomato paste, salt, sugar, pepper, citric acid. Let it simmer for 10 minutes.
Meanwhile, grate the honey gingerbread on a fine grater and mix with breadcrumbs. Pour the mixture into the meat, stir and watch how the sauce thickens. This will take 5-6 minutes.
Let's try. The meat should be sweet and sour, so if you don’t feel the sweetness, add a little sugar, add a little citric acid for sourness. Everything is fine?
Great. Esik fleisch is good with any traditional side dish, from potatoes to rice. And lovers prefer to eat it separately, dipping the sauce with a crust of bread. In any case, the recipe, which has survived centuries, is worth trying. Bon appetit!
©Uriel Stern Culinary School. Esik-fleisch (sweet and sour meat) - recipe
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Sweet and sour roast...
Then somehow I blurted out, not thinking that, they say, I’ll take and cook sweet and sour meat (“Esik fleisch”)! And who pulled my tongue? But you can’t erase words from the song. No sooner said than done!
“Esik-fleish” is a traditional “second” dish of Jewish cuisine. And Jewish cuisine is like moonshine - every family has its own recipes, and everyone is sure that his version is the most correct.
Naturally, I also think that mine is the most correct. Although my grandmother cooked a little differently. Without some components. Then I'll tell you which ones.
In general, to prepare this dish you will need:
good beef(you can also say “not very good”, but if it’s really tight, then you can take any) – I had 1.3 kg.
Onion- 3 pcs.
Tula gingerbread– 1 piece (130g.)
Rye bread(Ideally " Borodinsky", but they don’t sell normal “Borodinsky” here, so I had “Shakhtyorsky”) -1 pc.
Tomato paste– 2-3 tbsp. spoons.
Prunes- 10 pieces. (you can take more, but in principle you don’t have to take it, prunes somehow get lost in all this confusion)
Lemon- 1 PC.
Carnation– 2-3 pcs.
Cinnamon– 0.5 sticks
Bay leaf– 1-2 pcs.
Red pepper– 1 tsp.
Salt And ChSMP taste.
Vegetable oil– 2-3 tbsp. spoons.
Cut the meat into portions and fry in a small amount of vegetable oil until golden brown.
Place the fried meat in a saucepan or cast iron, generally in a vessel suitable for long stewing.
Cut the onion into cubes.
Fry the onion in the same pan where you fried the meat until transparent. We transfer the onions to the meat and fill everything with water. The water should be about 2-3 fingers above the meat. Close the lid. Let it boil and reduce the heat to "low-medium". You need to simmer until the meat is almost ready, and this depends on what kind of meat you are preparing. If it is young veal, then an hour is enough, and if the cow was already of retirement age, then at least 2 hours. Yes, and the onion should sort of dissolve. If your water has evaporated significantly, then do not hesitate to add more, because by the end of the stew there should still be a lot of water.
While the meat is stewing, let's make the future gravy.
All crusts must be cut off from the bread. Finely chop the pulp. The gingerbread also needs to be finely chopped.
My meat was quite young, so after about 70-75 minutes I started adding all the other ingredients. First add 2-3 tablespoons of tomato paste. Then I add cinnamon, cloves, bay leaf, and red pepper. I add bread and gingerbread. And everything needs to be stirred very, very thoroughly. Crush the bread and gingerbread just fine. If you feel that the sauce is becoming thick and you cannot mix everything well, do not hesitate to add water. This whole mess should have the consistency of thick sour cream.
When you have mixed everything thoroughly, add salt, ChSMP and freshly squeezed lemon juice. And try it to your taste. At first I only added the juice of half a lemon. The taste seemed too sweet to me (note that I didn’t add any sugar or honey - the sweetness comes from the gingerbread!) and, therefore, I added the juice of the second half of the lemon. And you try it to your taste. If you want it even sweeter, add sugar or honey. For more sourness, add more lemon juice. Close the lid again and cook the meat over low-medium heat for min. 10.
Don't let the process take its course! Stir occasionally, otherwise it may burn and the main thing is that the bread and gingerbread should turn into a homogeneous sauce. If the roast is too thick, add water and taste.
While the meat is cooking, pour boiling water over 10 prunes. Let stand for 5 minutes. Wash, cut into strips and add to meat. And cook for another 10 minutes. And stir, stir.
That's it! Turn off the fire. Let stand for 10 minutes. Place on a plate. Sprinkle with herbs. There is no need for a side dish for this meat. It should be eaten with challah or pita, dipping them in the sauce. I didn’t have either of these, so a simple baguette was quite suitable. Wash it down with dry red, maybe semi-sweet, vodka will also work.
And closer...
My grandmother prepared this dish a little differently. She only put in black bread, which gives you acid and makes you gluttonous. Granny did not add gingerbread and prunes, but added plum jam. Instead of lemon juice there was citric acid. Well, the only spices are salt, pepper and a little ground cinnamon. Grandma's essic fleisch tasted, of course, a little different!!!
If you still decide to cook this dish, let me give you a little advice: make half a portion. I got a hell of a lot more. But it was May 9, there were guests and they ate almost everything, there was just a little left. The next day, the roast is frozen so that it can be cut with a knife.
I apologize that there are few photos, but a lot of chatter. Photographic butt-handedness has not yet been overcome, so photos are kept to a minimum.
And, as our hunters say - eat, get better!!!
Stalik Khankishiev: “Do you know what will happen if you ask two Jews how to cook Jewish dishes? You will hear two diametrically opposed answers. And this will happen with every Jewish dish. Take, for example, Eisik Fleisch, Jewish-style sweet and sour meat. If you ask about how to make Eisik Fleisch, you will hear at least three different recipes, and one of them will be mine!”
Ingredients: beef brisket, salt, vinegar, gingerbread, poultry lard, vegetable oil, onion, garlic, black pepper, cloves, bay leaf, dried grated ginger, turmeric, canned tomatoes, water, narsharab sauce, honey, prunes.
Cut the meat into pieces.
Stalik Khankishiev: “If you cook in a completely Jewish way, in compliance with all Jewish rules, the laws of Kashrut, then the meat should be salted, allowed to settle, and then marinated. We'll do things a little simpler. I'll just cut the meat into pieces, salt them and start marinating. Moreover, you can get the cheapest meat. For example, I took the meat from the brisket. It’s absolutely not necessary to take tenderloin or fillet; everything will still be stewed and, one way or another, the meat will turn out soft.”
Salt the meat and pour vinegar over it. Mix and leave to marinate for 20 minutes.
Let's grate the gingerbread cookies.
Stalik Khankishiev: “For now, let’s get to the gingerbread cookies. In general, when preparing this recipe, you can use not only gingerbread, but also black bread, honey, and some spices. But here's the thing. As a rule, gingerbread cookies made from rye flour already contain everything necessary for preparing Eisik Fleisch - black bread itself, a little sweetness, a hint of mint.”
Turn on the heat and place a spoonful of poultry fat on the bottom of the pan.
Stalik Khankishiev: “What fat, what oil to cook with? The fact is that in Jewish cuisine, poultry fat is traditionally very often used, for example, chicken or duck fat.”
We will also add vegetable oil.
Stalik Khankishiev: "But if you don't want to use a lot of animal fat in your diet, add some vegetable oil."
When the oil is hot, start frying the meat.
Stalik Khankishiev: “There is no need to rush to mix. Each piece of meat should receive a confident golden brown crust. No need to interfere! Let the meat sit for just another minute. When you feel it browning underneath, it will sound different, then stir it. Do you hear the squealing?! So it's time."
When the meat is slightly fried and gets a crust, put the chopped onion in the pan.
Let's add a little garlic.
Add spices and herbs - a little black pepper, cloves, bay leaf, dried grated ginger and turmeric.
Stalik Khankishiev: “I want to say that Jews still remember that they are a slightly eastern people. That's why they love spices very much. But turmeric is my own supplement. In all dishes where I use a lot of onions, I always add turmeric. Do you know why? After all, the dish can remain for tomorrow. To prevent it from turning sour due to the large amount of onions, I add a little turmeric. Turmeric is a good antiseptic.”
After stirring, reduce the heat and cover the dish with a lid, leaving to simmer.
After some time, add canned tomatoes without skin.
Stalik Khankishiev: “The smell spread throughout the whole house! I feel like everything is just right here and it’s time to add the tomato. I take tomatoes that are peeled, preserved in their own juice without vinegar and without salt.”
Add a little water and stir the dish.
Stalik Khankishiev: “Scrape the bottom with a spoon. If there are pieces of meat attached to the bottom, they must be lifted so that they are soaked in the sauce.”
Add a spoonful of narsharab sauce and a spoonful of honey.
Stalik Khankishiev: “This dish should be sweet and sour at the same time. But there is still a little more sour than sweet. Therefore, I will put a spoonful of narsharab - this is reduced pomegranate juice. And you can take something else, starting with lemon juice. And definitely a good spoonful of honey.”
Let's add prunes.
Stalik Khankishiev: “If everything is good, you can add an ingredient that you could do without - prunes. If there are prunes, put them in, but if they don’t, there’s nothing wrong with that.”
Hello, friends! Today I prepared a dish of Jewish (more precisely, Ashkenazi) cuisine in a pressure cooker. This is esik-fleisch or Jewish-style sweet and sour beef with prunes.
A dish with history, originating in the Middle Ages. It was considered a poor man's dish. And now more and more housewives are cooking Jewish meat in a slow cooker. The sweet and sour beef turns out to be very tasty, and the cooking process itself is much simpler than traditional recipes.
Different culinary sources contain different versions of sweet and sour beef. That is, the cooking method itself is the same, but the products used, except meat, may change.
So, for example, somewhere instead of black bread they cook with gingerbread or gingerbread plus bread. Somewhere, instead of prunes, they put raisins or prunes plus raisins. Some people use fresh or tomato paste instead of canned tomatoes. Some of the spices use only black pepper and bay leaf, while the rest, especially cinnamon and cloves, are considered “lordly manners.”
As for meat, there is definitely no need to buy expensive tenderloin. After all, as I mentioned above, esik-fleisch from time immemorial was considered the food of the poor. And in our time, it is irrational to stew tenderloin.
My recipe is a kind of symbiosis. The recipe was based on tips I borrowed from Stalik Khankishiev, Uriel Stern, Pinchas Slabodnik and Rustam Tangirov. Well, I cook Jewish meat in a Redmond RMC-PM380 multi-pressure cooker.
Ingredients for cooking meat in Jewish style
- Beef without bone - 0.8-1 kg
- Onions - 2-3 heads
- Prunes (pitted) - 140 g
- Canned tomatoes in their own juice - 100-150 g
- Honey (liquid) - 2 tablespoons
- Black (rye) bread - 200 g
- Lemon juice - 2 tablespoons
- Salt - to taste
- Ground black pepper - ¼ teaspoon
- Garlic - 2-3 cloves
- Bay leaf - 2 pcs.
- Cinnamon - 1 stick
- Cloves - 3-4 buds
- Cumin - 1 teaspoon (not full)
- Turmeric - 1 teaspoon
- Butter - 1.5 tablespoons
- Vegetable oil - 1.5 tablespoons
- Water - optional
How to cook sweet and sour beef with prunes in Jewish style in a multicooker-pressure cooker
1. We collect all the necessary components for the esic flush. Next, prepare all the products for cooking. This will consist of the following: cut the washed beef into pieces no larger than 3 centimeters; Chop clean and peeled onions and garlic into cubes with a knife; wash the prunes, cut too large dried fruits into two parts; squeeze the juice out of the lemon; cut the canned tomatoes into several pieces, remove them if they have skins; Cut off the crusts from the bread and crumble the bread. Naturally, we put everything that was cut, squeezed, crumbled into different containers. Warm boiled water or boil fresh water and leave to cool slightly.
2. And now we start cooking in a multicooker-pressure cooker. Place butter in a saucepan and add vegetable oil. Do not close the lid and turn on “Frying/Deep Frying”, set the time to 25 minutes (default 18 minutes). We are waiting for a signal. This means that the pressure cooker has reached the desired temperature, and we can place the meat into the bowl. Fry the beef until the color changes. 
3. Add onion and garlic to the meat and continue frying. 
4. After 6-8 minutes, add salt, lemon juice, honey, all spices, prunes, tomatoes, bread. Pour some water and mix the contents of the multibowl. We do not turn off “Frying/drying”, we will need about six more minutes. During this time, the bread will swell and the liquid will thicken a little. Next, if the program has not completed, we turn it off ourselves. 
5. Add water so that the liquid is about two to three fingers higher than the beef and everything else. Close the lid, select “Stew/Jellied” on the pressure cooker display, time 30 minutes. Turn on “Start”, leave “Autoheating” on. Cook until the end of the program (the photo shows the dish after cooking) and leave it on the heat for 30-40 minutes (after all, according to all the rules for preparing esek-fleisch, the meat is simmered for a long time over low heat). 
6. Serve the finished esic fleisch to the table. Sweet and sour beef in sauce is served as a separate dish, but with various options. For example, the chef of the Moscow Jewish community, Pinchas Slabodnik, puts meat and prunes along with sauce in a deep dish. Moreover, it is served with slices of fresh orange, fresh strawberries (cut berries), and mint leaves. Stalik Khankishiev puts beef with prunes in a small plate. The sauce is poured into a gravy boat and placed next to it. And Uriel Stern says that any side dish from potatoes to rice is appropriate for this delicious dish. I’ll add, very tasty in any version. And yet, we (my family) prefer a side dish - potatoes, pasta, rice. 
Go to Israel and ask: what is Jewish cuisine?
No, no, you go and ask! What’s stopping you from asking at least two Jews what Jewish cuisine is and getting three mutually exclusive answers to begin with?
A Jewish Moroccan will tell you about the viscous, aromatic dishes of the Maghreb and explain that only goyim eat without couscous.
A Bukharian Jew will tell you about bakhsha and how good fried fish with garlic and cilantro is on the table.
And a Jew, a native of Eastern Europe, will shower you with peas of names, even in Yiddish sounding subtly familiar.
Well, in fact, isn’t it clear what an ASIC flash is?
Eisik is sour, acid, and fleisch is meat! But translated into Russian, the name of this dish fully reveals its essence: sweet and sour meat.
New, relatively recently invented dishes have one, “single correct” preparation option, which is often quite clumsy.
Old dishes acquire perfect forms, honed by time and polished by the experience of millions of people. But sometimes culinary antiquities become like wood because of the dozens of variants with which they are overgrown. At the same time, any of the branches looks harmonious and tempting.
Any written recipe for Eisik Fleisch begins with the same phrase: take fatter beef. This phrase is like a trunk, like a foundation. And do you know how much wisdom there is in these three words? Do you know how to translate this phrase from Hebrew to any other language? A large family will never be satisfied with Lenten food for long! If you want your boys to be smart and cheerful, and your daughters to be slim and hard-working, buy brisket from the butcher, not tenderloin. As a last resort, if you are late to the butcher, take the ribs, or that piece that can be fried, and then stewed for a long time and with feeling, filling the house with the heady smell of prosperity.
Now, if you take ribs not of beef, where a layer of fat passes through the layer of meat, but of veal, you will have to spend a lot of poultry lard, or pour vegetable oil into the vessel. After all, you can already stew them, but they are quite lean!
The ribs should be salted in advance with coarse salt, pepper and poured with vinegar or sour wine to prevent this from happening. If you follow traditions, then the meat must be washed after salting.
It doesn’t matter that after these manipulations it won’t fry for a long time, but will begin to hiss and splash with oil - just don’t rush the time! Everything will work out, you just have to wait.
But by the time the meat can be called fried, it will already be half cooked.
Then you need to add chopped onion, garlic, bay leaf, a few clove buds and black peppercorns to the meat.
Reduce heat and cover the dish - you are familiar with this technique from lamb ribs with onions.
When the onion releases juice, I usually add turmeric and grated dry ginger. Turmeric is my hobby, I always add turmeric if I'm cooking a meal that has a lot of onions in it. I’ll explain later why I add dry grated ginger.
If you have good fresh tomatoes, grate them, leaving the skin on.
If not, grind the canned ones in a blender.
Pour the mashed tomatoes into the pan, let it boil and add water so that it completely covers the meat.
After the water boils, add salt, taste and decide - is the broth sour enough? If not, then add something to improve the situation. For example, I took nar-sharab.
You can do without tomatoes at all, and fill it with clean water, but then add something sour - for example, tomato paste.
But tomato paste, and tomatoes themselves, are a fairly new thing in cooking, and before, asic flush was soured either with apple marshmallow - lavash, or with some other sour products, even sour dried fruits.
After the dish has become sufficiently sour, it should be... sweetened. For example, honey. Take honey with light aromas - this is my advice. If there is no honey, well, add sugar.
I know how some cooks are afraid of the word “sugar” when it comes to meat dishes. They think that sugar will make the dish tasteless. What can I say to dispel doubts associated with lack of experience? It’s better to remain silent - time will straighten everything out. After all, it was time and experience that taught the Jews that to get a tasty sauce, first add sour and then sweet.
Time, experience and frugality taught the Jews how to turn a rather thin broth into a thick and satisfying sauce.
Probably, someone once simply crumbled bread into a plate, as many people do when they want to eat only soup, but at the same time be properly satiated. But, most likely, this method goes back to much more ancient dishes, from which the Russian prison, the Iranian-Turkic halim, and the Maghreb harrisa have their roots. After all, for sure, the first way to consume cereals was to add them to meat brew, and the addition of bread was a later modernization and, at the same time, a way to use stale bread. I have come across descriptions of sweet and sour sauce, where even flour was used as a thickener. That is, human experience has consistently passed along the path of grain - cereals - flour - bread.
But the most surprising thing is the addition of grated honey-gingerbread to the Eisik Fleisch, not of crustless black bread. Can you imagine this picture? Someone brought an expensive gift to the family - a printed gingerbread. They showed it to children for a long time, trying to get them to obey and diligently study, and then, one fine day, a mother or grandfather exclaimed, “Don’t let anyone get you!” rubbed this almost icon into a pan of meat!
So what? Here's bread for you, here's honey for you, here's ginger (which I added at the very beginning) and everything will go exactly to the right place - we'll still eat it, kids? There is no need to cry, but you need to stir in the pan until the bones and meat grind the gingerbread or bread into a homogeneous mass.
You'll be surprised how much bread you can crumble into one pan until you get the thick sauce you're supposed to get! Now it’s time for the prunes and something needs to be done to prevent the sauce and meat from burning. The thicker the contents of the pan, the worse the heat is distributed throughout the contents by convection. Therefore, either install a divider or completely remove the vessel into the oven, preheated to 100-120C. But sometimes you still have to stir, at least to ensure that the oil does not cut off and the sauce remains homogeneous. When the prunes soften, when the sauce becomes smooth and acquires a rich red color, consider it ready.
You can serve. Meat and prunes are served separately, and the sauce is served separately.
After they eat the meat, they begin to eat the sauce, which they eat by dipping... bread in it.
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