Pampushka

Pampushka (pl. pampushky) is a little or medium-sized tender bun coated with garlic sauce. Usually borshch is served with pampushky. But they are so delicious that it’s hard to stand from eating all pampushky at once without borscht or anything else. I use the same dough that I use for khachapuri.

Ingredients (dough):

• 1 tsp of dry yeast
• 200 ml of warm water (36-38°C)
• 100 ml of warm milk (36-38°C)
• 400 g + 1 tbsp of all-purpose wheat flour (+ some more for shaping)
• 1 tsp of salt
• 1,5 tsp of sugar
• 50 ml of flavorless oil
• 1 egg to cover buns prior to baking (actually you will need 1/2 of small-sized chicken egg, the other half you can add to the dough in step 3); also you can use milk instead of egg, pampushky will be not so glossy in this case

Ingredients (garlic sauce):

• 3 cloves of garlic (~12-15 g)
• 0,5 tsp of fine grain salt
• 4-5 tbsp of flavorless oil

Instructions

1. Depending on what you will find on the package of dry yeast, add yeast to flour (than go straight to step #3) or to the water (cover the glass and give yeast 10-15 min. to activate).

2. Warm the milk up in microwave oven (you can check the temperature with finger – it should be luke warm). Add milk and 1 tbsp of flour to yeast. Mix it, cover and leave for 15 min.

3. Put flour, salt & sugar to a bowl (3 liter capacity will be perfect), combine them with a tablespoon. Add oil and yeast mixture. Take the 2d tablespoon and knead the dough using 2 spoons. I don’t recommend kneading this dough with hands: it’s too sticky.

4. Cover the dough and leave to rise for 45 min.

5. While the dough is rising, let’s prepare garlic sauce. Take a glass. Use press for garlic, add salt and stir it with garlic. Leave it for 2 min. Then add oil and mix it well.

6. Now we have ready to use but still sticky dough. The most important thing is to leave most of bubbles that the dough has now. That’s why we’ll do everything this way: first of all sprinkle working surface with some flour. Now turn the bowl and help the dough to come out by cutting it off bowl’s walls with a spoon (knife, spatula, whatever).

Cover your hands with some flour + gently rub the surface of dough with some flour (in order to reduce its stickiness).

Now you should divide the dough in parts. Depending on size of pampushky, you can make 10-20 buns. In order to divide dough without disturbing bubbles, pinch dough with fingers and nip it off. Places where the dough was pinched turn to 1 side and put bun in a non-stick baking mold with these turned pinches down. So the surface of pampushka will be flat.

When you finish with it, cover baking mold with a towel or plastic bag and give 20 min. for pampushky to rise.

7. Preheat oven to 220-240°C. I use convection mode. Pampushky will have another 5 min. to rise. Then uncover the mold and cover pampushky with mixed egg (or milk).

8. Put pampushky in oven and bake 15 min.

9. Switch off the oven and take pampushky out. Put them on a rack and leave for 15 min. in order to cool them down. Then cover pampushki with garlic sauce.