Shelpek Recipe: Methods for Making Kazakh Tortillas

Each people, as a rule, has its own national cuisine with special dishes and different ways of cooking them. Since childhood, any Kazakh woman knows the shelpek recipe. These cakes in every house are always in the main place.

National traditions

Kazakhs are very proud of their national culture. These are not only costumes, dances or any rites. They consider their national cuisine a real pride. Among the huge variety of dishes, a special place, of course, is bread. For Kazakhs, these are cakes with a rather unusual name. Shelpek recipe is familiar to all housewives since childhood. They are prepared on weekdays and holidays. Famous oriental cakes meet guests and escort friends on a long journey. You can cook such bread in water, milk or kefir. The simplest shelpek recipe includes three main components: for 3 cups of flour, you need a teaspoon of salt and a glass of water.

Making cakes is not difficult at all:

1. First, all the products need to be combined together and knead fairly thick dough from them.
2. Using a knife, divide the semi-finished product into several parts.
3. Roll each piece with a rolling pin into a pancake 2-3 mm thick.
4. Put the pan on the fire and heat vegetable oil in it.
5. Now the workpieces need to be laid out in boiling fat and fried for 3 seconds on each side. For better frying, the cakes should be moved with a fork in the pan, rotating them in a circle.

The finished products will only need to be put on a napkin to leave excess fat on it, and then carried to the table.

Complex composition

If dairy products are used instead of water, then the taste of tortillas will turn out to be more pronounced. Take, for example, a recipe for silk on milk. To do this, you need: a glass of milk for 400 grams of flour, 5 grams of salt and baking soda, a tablespoon of granulated sugar, 400 milliliters of vegetable oil and a teaspoon of table vinegar.

The cooking process goes through these steps:

1. Mix warmed milk with sugar, salt and three tablespoons of vegetable oil.
2. Add the same soda, slaked with vinegar.
3. Gradually adding flour, gently knead the dough. Then cover it with a towel and leave for 15-20 minutes.
4. Tear a piece from the finished dough and roll it into a 1-2 mm thick cake.
5. Heat the remaining oil in a pan and fry the peel in it. Lush cakes are deep-fried. They should directly swim in fat.

Before serving, you can wrap any filling to your taste in them. It can be specially cooked meat or a mixture of vegetables.

Different opinions

Some people think that the dough for silk should certainly be dense and thick. But this is not true. There are different options for its preparation, from which an excellent Kazakh silk can be obtained. The recipe, which uses yeast, is very similar to another flour dish of local cuisine called Baursaki. The composition of the components is taken practically the same: 5 cups of flour, 25 grams of pressed yeast, 2 tablespoons of sour cream and melted butter, 10 grams of sugar, half a glass of water and a couple of glasses of vegetable oil are taken in a glass of milk.

In this case, the process will go as follows:

1. To prepare the dough, you first need to heat the water and dissolve the salt with sugar in it.
2. Yeast diluted in milk. To make them work faster, you can add a little sugar.
3. Introduce ghee, and then mix the solutions.
4. When adding flour in parts, knead the dough. Cover it with a lid or cloth and leave it to proof for about an hour.
5. Now, in the usual way, divide the dough into pieces, roll each of them into a thin layer, and then fry in boiling oil.

Shelpeks prepared in this way are more delicate and aromatic.

Kefir cakes

If, for example, there is no milk in the house, then the shelpec cakes recipe can be slightly corrected. In this case, the set of products will change slightly. For baking you will need: per kilogram of flour - a liter of kefir, 50 grams of sugar, a pinch of salt, half a teaspoon of soda and 150 grams of sour cream.

Cooking method:

1. First, in a separate bowl, you need to mix kefir, soda and sour cream.
2. Then, gradually adding small portions of flour and other components, knead a soft, plastic dough.
3. Now the mass must be divided into 2 parts, each of which is rolled into a bundle.
4. Cut the dough pieces into identical pieces and sprinkle them with flour.
5. Roll out the resulting semi-finished products with a rolling pin into flat cakes, and then alternately fry them in oil on both sides.

Ready shelpecks carefully using two forks to remove from the pan and stack in a stack on a plate. Excess oil can be removed if paper towels are placed between them. A little later they should be thrown away.