It so happened that Belarus did not use salads as food until the 19th century, being content with simple ordinary dishes. Moreover, until the end of the twenties of the last century, nobody knew about any Belarusian salad - everyone's attention was riveted to the recently appeared “Sh.U.B.E.” - now known to everyone as a herring under a fur coat. But time passed, and a modest native from a kindred country slowly took a strong place among lovers of plain dishes, proving to the world that simplicity and naturalness are also valuable.
Essential Ingredients
The traditional Belarusian salad recipe includes simple ingredients available to every family. For its preparation, the following proportions are necessary:
- Three hundred grams of liver, as usual, is beef, but for lack of it you can use calf and even chicken, the main condition is the absolute freshness of the product.
- Two hundred grams of any mushrooms: from wild boletus or mushrooms to the ubiquitous champignons.
- Two or three onions and as many pickled cucumbers.
- Three to four chicken eggs.
- Mayonnaise or sour cream for dressing the finished dish.
You will also need sunflower oil, a little flour for breading and, of course, salt with spices to enhance the taste and give the “Belarusian” salad a refined aroma. It is worth noting that if there are no fresh mushrooms available, then you can use frozen ones in the same amount.
Basic Product Preparation
As usual, boiled liver is needed in a salad from a friendly country, but since this product is easy to spoil, turning it into a dry and tasteless piece, inventive housewives found an interesting way out: they fry the liver in a frying pan, previously cut into thin slices and sprinkled with flour. Of course, the procedure is more time-consuming than just cooking, but it's worth it.
So, beef liver veins and films are removed, then it is cut into layers no more than one centimeter thick, lightly sprinkled with black pepper and crumbled in flour. Fry in vegetable oil until golden brown, turning over during heat treatment. Put the finished liver on a paper towel, because excess fat in the salad is useless.
While the liver cools, you can do mushrooms: cut into small slices and fry in the same oil until golden brown, in the process sprinkle with salt and a small amount of coriander. If the mushrooms are taken frozen, then before cooking it is worth boiling them for eight minutes in salted water, and only then fry them. You should also boil chicken eggs to a steep state.
Step cooking
When the liver and mushrooms in the Belarusian salad have already been cooked, you can start assembling it, but first you need to chop the onions and fry them until transparent in vegetable oil. Next, cut the liver into squares or short cubes, eggs into cubes, and pickled cucumbers in half circles. By the way, it is important to choose this product carefully: cucumbers should not be salted, peroxide or have any other property with an over-amplifier, otherwise the taste of the salad will be thoroughly ruined.
All components of the dish are mixed in a salad bowl, mayonnaise is added, which Belarusian hostesses often dilute sour cream in a 1: 1 ratio, although for what purpose it is not known. The difference in calorie content is small, the taste is for an amateur, and apparently there are no differences. If you want a more spicy taste, then you can add black pepper, grated nutmeg or a pinch of thyme to the liver or mushrooms.
If there are no fresh mushrooms
Considering that Belarus is a country of forests, it is natural that mushrooms in the Belarusian salad are used in the forest, which enterprising housewives store for the winter, drying in free air. Therefore, this salad can be prepared even from dried mushrooms, but first they need to be soaked in slightly lukewarm water or milk for three to four hours, then boiled for ten minutes, and only then fry a little over high heat until golden brown. Given that dry mushrooms are much smaller in weight than soaked ones, the proportions given above take only forty grams of dried mushrooms, which will take the desired amount during processing.
Submission Options
Belarusian salad with liver requires a short exposure (one hour) in order for its components to exchange aromas and taste notes, so there is time to think about how to serve the dish. Of course, you can traditionally slide in a salad bowl, decorating with the ubiquitous sprig of parsley or chopped green onions, or you can go ahead and make tartlets from shortcrust pastry and fill them with salad, and decorate with a slice of tomato or pepper on top. It will be unusual, festive and very tasty.
You can also lay the salad in layers: at the bottom of a flat dish, place the liver in an even layer, grease with mayonnaise and lay the fried onions on top, on top of it a layer of mushrooms, on which again you need to draw a grid of mayonnaise sauce. Then a layer of cucumbers, even mayonnaise and sprinkle everything with grated eggs, you can mix with chopped feathers of green onions.
The same principle can be used to serve “Belarusian” salad in glasses (or bowls): the salad in them is also arranged in layers and decorated with seasonal vegetables or a pickled mushroom on a green onion pillow. You can also use boiled carrots as a decoration by cutting out pretty roses from it.
"White Vezha"
This salad has such a name in its homeland, in Belarus. They say that it is named after the reserve Bialowieza Forest, although literally this phrase translates as a white tower. Although there is no official confirmation from the masters of culinary art, it is believed that the name of the salad was given in honor of this great place of nature, where magnificent bison live and are protected and protected from poachers.
They also say that until the nineties of the last century this salad was served in a slightly different way: the liver was still fried in slices, but they did not cut it into the salad itself, mixing only mushrooms, onions and pickles with mayonnaise. “Belarusian” lettuce was laid out on a portion plate with a slide, and slices of the liver were hoisted from above: they towered like proud bison above mother earth. An entertaining story, does anyone know if this is true?