Manty: recipe is easier than it seems

Manty is a traditional dish of oriental cuisine. In one form or another, and under different names, it is found in the kitchens of almost all the peoples of the southeast and east of Russia and many others, but the essence of all of them is a juicy chopped meat steamed in a thin fresh dough . This combination of products and cooking techniques makes their taste different from cooked in water dishes, for example, dumplings - they are more juicy and fragrant. Mantas, a recipe for cooking which has been known for thousands of years, are prepared from fatty meat, most often mutton, but in other cases pork and even beef are allowed. Only in the case of beef it is better to twist it through a meat grinder along with lard or fat pork, and take the beef low-fat. Meat necessarily must be fat because it is necessary to make the dish juicy - this is very important.

So, the selected meat should be cut along the fibers into long pieces and frozen a little, and then chop into small pieces. This is also very important - mince mantles are fundamentally different from mantles from chopped meat. Also, in order to make manta succulent, a lot of onions need to be added to the meat - almost or as much as meat itself. Some people prepare manti, the recipe of which sometimes resembles similar Chinese dishes: they add together with onions and finely chopped scalded boiled cabbage. This excellent find allows not only to make them very juicy, but also gives a very unusual taste, on which it is impossible to understand that cabbage was used in cooking. The ratio of meat and vegetables remains the same - about 1: 1. As a rule, garlic is added to such mantles, the recipe of which means adding cabbage, although it is not usually present in the mantle recipe. They can also have a different form and are otherwise called, but the basic concept is the same. For traditional mantles, spices such as black pepper, zira and sometimes greens are used.

The recipe for the mantle test can also differ in some cases. Traditionally, it is prepared from two or three eggs. A glass of water and flour - the amount that it will take, usually two glasses. Sometimes dough for mantas is cooked on milk, and often it is done at all without adding any liquid: in this case it turns out to be denser and more elastic, but it's worse molded, but it ensures that the mantas remain intact after cooking, and The tastiest broth will remain inside them. Also, the dough consisting of eggs and flour alone, is perfect if the mantle is supposed to freeze. Since in this case they will have to cook at least twice as long. The dough for mantles is stirred for a long time, about 20 minutes, and then it must lie still for the same amount of time so that the flour is soaked with liquid, and it becomes more elastic.

Next, consider the most difficult question: how to make mantas. Their seemingly complicated at first sight form is actually done very simply. Take a small, somewhere around 50 grams, a piece of dough and roll out to about a thickness of 1-2 millimeters, and the diameter of the circle should be about 12 centimeters. At its center is laid out so much meat, which is placed in a tablespoon with a good slide. Further diametrically opposite parts of the circle are tied over the meat in the middle, and also done with the remaining edges. It turns out, as it were, a rectangular envelope sealed in the middle. Its corners, too, are connected in pairs with each other, and traditional-shaped mantles are ready. In some cases, for example, called poses, the shape will be slightly different: the dough is tucked in creases in the center, and a small hole is left in the middle, and, by the way, they are made with garlic.

Manty is cooked, the recipe of which means chopped meat, a few minutes longer than those made with minced meat. In an ordinary steamer mounted on a stove, mantas from minced meat are cooked for about 7 minutes at maximum heat, and 10-15 minutes from meat. In the electric steamer, the process can take a long time, sometimes up to half an hour, or even an hour. Frozen mantles should be cooked twice as long as usual. In the water you can add spices - it will add a subtle flavor. The readiness of the mantles can be checked by the transparency of the broth, which will be visible through the left holes.