And here’s one of the life-saving tricks for the kitchen in summer

Cold soup for a heatwave — ingredients and method

INGREDIENTS:

• 400 g soy yoghurt
• 150 g cucumber
• 20 g mustard
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1–2 tsp sugar or other sweetener
• 1–2 tbsp lime or lemon juice
• 50 g tofu
• 30 g oil

METHOD:

Blend the yoghurt, cucumber, mustard, salt, sugar, tofu and juice together.

While blending, slowly pour in the oil

NOTES:

Oil obviously doesn’t mix with yoghurt, which is mostly water.

But both soy and mustard contain lecithin, an emulsifier, which is why blending lets you mix the oil thoroughly into the water. Exactly the same mechanism is used for making mayonnaise from soy milk

SERVING:

Best straight from the fridge. If it’s really hot, you can serve it with ice cubes

How hot does a kitchen actually get in summer?

In summer I look at the weather forecast with more dread than at a child-support summons.

The kitchen is always at least a few, usually ten degrees hotter than outside. Lucky me that during the last heatwave, when it hit 38°, we had no guests. And for the next event the forecast says a fairly moderate twenty-something degrees.

On top of the heat in the kitchen there’s high humidity. For ****’s sake, no need to fly to exotic countries, you’ve got the tropics right there at work.

And of course kitchens have extractor hoods over the stove, but when it’s hot outside, they mainly pull out the water and oil vapour from above the pots, and the particles rising from them while you cook — the temperature barely drops.

How do you cool down in a hot kitchen?

If you can’t cool the room, you can cool yourself. A water spray bottle, say, or soaking your cap. But the king of these methods is the wet T-shirt.

The best way to cool down in a hot kitchen is a wet T-shirt, soaked in cool water.

What counts as real work?

That’s the kitchen. Hard, tough, chop or die… That’s proper work, not ******* about with nonsense.

This is what I’d do, I’m no techno-utopian, but I believe in what technology can do and it could already be done:

First, an hour of hard work, not necessarily in a kitchen. A tram driver doesn’t have it easy either, or a Lidl checkout girl (even now they no longer have to wear nappies to work). And only then an hour of ******* about with nonsense.

Most of the intelligentsia and LinkedIn experts, if they swung a shovel for a few hours, wouldn’t have the strength left for ******* about with nonsense online. The strength would be with working people, the grafters, for whom 8 hours of ******* graft is the norm.

By the way, I’ve got a second point for the definition of what real work is.

Reminder of the first: real work is work your smartwatch registers as a workout

The second: work during which you’ve no time for ******* about with nonsense online.

So is your job real work, or at best a bullshit job?

Or, the horror, are you a LinkedIn expert?

Questions you’d ask anyway

What thickens a cold soup without cream?
Nothing. Tofu and soy yoghurt bring the body themselves, and the oil driven in by the blender turns it into an emulsion. You control the thickness with the tofu — more tofu, thicker soup.

Why doesn’t the oil separate from the yoghurt?
Because soy and mustard contain lecithin. That’s an emulsifier — it holds fat and water together, exactly like in mayonnaise. Pour the oil in slowly with the blender running.

How do you cool down in a kitchen that hits 38°C?
A wet T-shirt soaked in cool water. A spray bottle and a soaked cap work too, just not as long. The extractor hood pulls out vapour, not temperature.

What is a bullshit job?
David Graeber’s term — a job the person doing it considers pointless. My two tests: real work is work your smartwatch registers as a workout, and work that leaves you no time for the internet.

Read next:

• How to Avoid Food Poisoning in Summer — heat isn’t only about discomfort
• Five Dark Sides of Working in a Kitchen — the long version of “chop or die”
• Plant-Based Yolk Sauce — same mustard emulsion, different job
• More soups

In our kitchen world, the best motivation for good work is a good tip. If you like my recipes, leave me a tip

My social media

I’m joking, of course. It’s hard to keep a straight face about something like this. But on the other hand, the issue is more important than it might seem at first glance.

What am I talking about?

The judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union of 14 June 2017, Case C-422/16:

“Purely plant-based products may not, in principle, be marketed under names such as ‘milk’, ‘cream’, ‘butter’, ‘cheese’ or ‘yoghurt’, which EU law reserves for products of animal origin. This also applies where such names are supplemented by clarifications or descriptions indicating the plant-based origin of the product.”

So what exactly should I call my creation?

INGREDIENTS

• 1.5 litres of soy milk (or more)
• Yogurt starter culture (according to the instructions on the package)
• 1 tablespoon of sugar (if using unsweetened soy milk)
• Juice of one lemon

METHOD

Bring the soy milk to a boil—carefully, because soy milk foams up even more enthusiastically than cow’s milk. Let it cool down.

Add the yogurt culture. If the milk is unsweetened, add a tablespoon of sugar and stir.

Pour the milk into a yogurt maker (see notes) and leave it running for at least eight hours, until you get the consistency of a strongly fermented yogurt.

Transfer the finished yogurt to a pot, add the lemon juice, and heat gently over very low heat for 20–30 minutes, without exceeding 70°C (158°F). Do not let it boil!

After a while, a clearly visible curd will form. Carefully pour everything onto a cloth-lined sieve and leave it to drain. Once most of the liquid is gone, wrap the curd in the cloth and squeeze firmly.

VARIATIONS

You can also use lime juice, citric acid, or even mild vinegar to curdle the protein. The important thing is the acidic environment.

You can make this forbidden dairy alternative from any plant milk with a reasonably high protein content. In Germany, for example, pea milk is available (I’ve already made yogurt from it), as well as lupin milk, which I still need to try.

NOTES

You’ll need a yogurt maker.

You can also make the yogurt in many bread machines using the fermentation programme or in multicookers that have a dedicated yogurt setting. The key is maintaining a temperature of 40°C (104°F) for an extended period, allowing the bacteria to do their work.

The finished cheese is a bit drier than traditional Polish cottage cheese, probably because soy milk contains far less fat. Next time I want to add some fat—perhaps avocado oil. The challenge will be creating a stable emulsion so that the oil mixes properly with the plant milk.

SERVING

Serve it exactly as you would traditional cottage cheese: with radishes, chives, tomatoes, or yogurt. Use it as a filling for pancakes or savoury crêpes. It also works beautifully fried with onions and served with pasta.

Back in 2017, the CJEU ruled that terms such as soy cheese, plant milk, or soy cottage cheese were illegal within the European Union.

An even more absurd proposal followed: Amendment 171, debated in the European Parliament. It would not only have banned dairy-related names but also packaging resembling traditional dairy cartons, visual representations evoking cheese wheels or milk splashes, descriptive phrases such as “buttery” or “plant-based alternative to yogurt,” and perhaps most ridiculously of all, even claims about the lower carbon footprint of plant-based products compared with animal ones.

Fortunately, that nonsense, heavily backed by dairy lobbyists, was rejected. The same happened to Amendment 165, which would have prohibited terms such as plant-based burger, vegan sausage, and probably even the plant-based blood sausage I tried in Poland recently—which, to be fair, was surprisingly decent.

But the issue goes much deeper than simply mocking bureaucrats or criticising agricultural lobbies.

Ironically, these amendments reveal a split within the meat and dairy industries themselves. Some companies are desperately trying to stop the plant-based trend, while others are enthusiastically embracing it.

One common argument against terms like soy milk, vegan cheese, or plant-based burgers is that these products have always been animal-based and that such names never existed historically.

That is simply wrong.

Centuries ago, people already made almond milk, almond cheese, and fig sausages.

And in more recent history, Polish vegetarian cookbooks offer countless examples. Kosowska’s Vegetarian Cookbook from 1929 contains recipes for Viennese cutlets made from oats. In One Hundred Lenten and Vegetarian Dishes, by the immensely popular interwar author Pani Elżbieta (Elżbieta Kiewnarska), we find cutlets made from beans, peas, root vegetables, carrots, spinach, fennel, buckwheat, potatoes, rice, lentil loaves, and even bean cheese.

The more fundamental question is this:

What actually makes a burger a burger? Or cottage cheese, cottage cheese?

Is it the ingredients alone? Or does the product’s function on the plate and the method by which it is made matter as well?

I made my soy cottage cheese using exactly the same process as traditional cottage cheese. Its essential component is also the same: coagulated protein.

Yes, I quite like the playful alternative name sorozhek that I once encountered somewhere. But honestly, there is no good reason why a product made from plant protein should be denied the name cottage cheese simply because the protein comes from soybeans instead of cows.

And beyond all that—last but not least—this kind of evolution happens in cooking all the time.

It is one of the fundamental reasons why culinary culture develops.

Recipes change over centuries. Today’s Polish bigos bears little resemblance to its original form, which consisted almost entirely of meat with perhaps some apples and onions. Frankfurters were originally made only from pork. Chicken ham is a modern invention. By definition, ham meant pork. A hamburger was beef and beef alone.

There is absolutely no reason to erect absurd bureaucratic barriers against culinary creativity or to preserve recipes as if they were sacred standards locked away in Sèvres.

The beauty of cooking lies precisely in constant change, experimentation, and improvement.

Without that, cuisine becomes a museum.

And while spending a day or two in a living-history village, playing “How Our Ancestors Lived,” can be tremendous fun, nobody would actually want to spend their entire life there.

Even the increasingly popular movement of culinary reconstruction in Poland isn’t about reproducing old dishes exactly as they once were. We cook on different stoves, with different ingredients, under completely different circumstances. Reconstruction is really about creating something new: interpretations and arrangements inspired by historical flavours.

Plant-based cooking is particularly fascinating in this regard. By its very nature, it deconstructs traditional meat dishes, recreating familiar flavours from entirely different ingredients.

And then it goes one step further, transcending the original and using it merely as a point of departure for new explorations of taste and texture.

Any attempt to limit that imagination and creativity is a crime greater than extinguishing a star.

How do I know? I do my homework — no smoke and mirrors. Here are the receipts.

“Something cold with caffeine!”

That’s what I asked for on Saturday at a restaurant in Hamburg.

And what I got tasted so good that I created my own version of a matcha latte. Or maybe more of a smoothie.

INGREDIENTS:

• 1 litre of soy milk (or any other plant milk)
• 1 can of coconut milk
• 2 small ripe bananas (see Notes)
• 1 heaped tablespoon (15 g) of matcha
• 3 tablespoons (30 g) of sugar
• 2 tablespoons of lemon juice

METHOD:

Keep all the ingredients in the fridge for at least two hours beforehand—especially the soy milk and coconut milk—so everything is nicely chilled.

Blend all the ingredients together in a high-speed blender for a few minutes, until the drink becomes slightly whipped and frothy.

VARIATIONS:

You can add cinnamon or ginger. Instead of bananas, you can use mango or other fruits. Just remember that different fruits will affect the colour.

NOTES:

The best bananas for this are the ones nobody wants to buy at the supermarket. The more brown spots they have, the riper and sweeter they are.

SERVING:

Serve in a tall glass with plenty of ice cubes.

I bought a packet of matcha some time ago, more for experiments than for drinking. I wanted to use it for colouring things, like the icing for Queen Elizabeth’s cake. (I really need to write that recipe down properly and publish it.)

During the French Revolution, I would have been the kind of person making sure the guillotine didn’t jam. But when it comes to cake, I have to admit that the World’s Most Aristocratic Alcoholic had excellent taste.

Although whether she could actually taste anything is another matter. Two hundred grams of alcohol every day doesn’t just damage your brain—it dulls your sense of taste as well. Even when you’re technically sober, your brain remains permanently fogged by alcohol.

I lived like that for a while. Aristocrats live like that all the time. A bunch of degenerate bastards. Elite degenerates!

Matcha used to be elite as well. It was available only to the upper few percent of society: feudal lords, the shogun, aristocrats, and courtiers.

Producing matcha is far more labour-intensive and expensive than making ordinary green tea. Two key elements make the process particularly demanding and costly.

And, just as today, the people doing that work could rarely afford to drink such tea themselves.

The first factor is the special shading structures built over the tea plants so they mature in the shade. This increases chlorophyll levels and gives matcha its beautiful green colour.

Another defining characteristic of matcha—and the reason this recipe produces a smooth suspension rather than loose tea leaves—is the fineness of the grind.

Matcha is traditionally ground in slow-turning stone mills into a powder measuring just 5 to 10 micrometres—that is, thousandths of a millimetre.

Today, both shading and grinding are much easier and faster than they were a century ago. That has democratised matcha, making it available to many more people.

But it has also created a paradox that appears in many areas, including overtourism.

Democratisation means accessibility for everyone.

And that accessibility can threaten the very quality and traditions that made something popular in the first place.

You cannot expand production indefinitely, especially in a country like Japan, where land is scarce.

I imagine there are quite a few Japanese people complaining about the “white dogs”—or whatever equally colourful term they use for Westerners—because all these foreigners are drinking the matcha that used to be reserved for tea ceremonies.

At this rate, we’ll soon see tea-ceremony militias in traditional robes carrying banners saying:

“Matcha for the Japanese!”

A few years ago, I would have called that an absurd idea.

These days, not so much.

And I still have plenty of matcha left, so I’m sure I’ll come up with a few more interesting things to do with it.

One glass of cold water (250 ml)
One tablespoon of coffee (or however much you normally use for a single serving)

Stir it and leave it for 12 hours.

The easiest way is to make it in the evening while preparing dinner and put it in the fridge. Make sure it’s covered or sealed so it doesn’t absorb other smells. By morning, it’ll be ready.

And that’s it—you’ve got cold brew coffee, brewed without heat. I think it’s a fantastic drink, but try it yourself and see what you think.

Of course, you can take it further in all sorts of ways—for example, by adding orange juice.

Add orange juice in an amount equal to about one-third to one-quarter of the coffee. Sweeten if you like. I added two tablespoons of agave syrup to roughly two litres, but if it gets too sweet, it loses some of its character.

Throw in a few ice cubes if you have them, and you’re good to go.

The same is true of Ilex paraguariensis, the Paraguayan holly used to make yerba mate. Today, Poland is among Europe’s leading consumers of yerba, and the Polish history of this herb stretches back… 160 years!

And that’s a good thing, because yerba is packed with nutrients and gives you a better boost than coffee. It can be a perfect drink for a party—not just on New Year’s Eve—but also for… dealing with the hardships of the following day.

Basic Version

INGREDIENTS:

• 50 g of yerba mate (2–3 handfuls)
• 5 g of dried lemongrass or two fresh stalks
• 300 ml of orange juice
• 2–3 tablespoons of sugar

PREPARATION:

Pour 750 ml of hot water (not boiling!) over the yerba mate. The ideal temperature is between 70–80°C (158–176°F). Leave it to cool slowly.

Once it has cooled, add the orange juice and two or three tablespoons of sugar and stir.

Strain through a sieve and top up with cold water to make 1.5 litres in total.

VARIATIONS:

Instead of pure orange juice, you can use a mixture of two parts orange juice and one part lime juice.

NOTES:

The amount of sugar depends on the sweetness of the juice. The sweeter the juice, the less sugar you’ll need. Personally, I don’t sweeten drinks like this, but considering the trials of the following day, some quick energy from simple carbohydrates is definitely welcome.

You can brew the leaves two or three more times.

Yerbanada—not just for a hangover.

Yerbanada Tereré

INGREDIENTS:

• 50 g of yerba mate
• 10 ice cubes
• Cold water
• 250 ml of orange juice
• 2–3 tablespoons of sugar

PREPARATION:

Boil the water beforehand and chill it in the fridge until it reaches just a few degrees above freezing.

Add the ice cubes to the yerba mate and pour over one litre of cold water.

Leave it in the refrigerator for one or two hours.

Add the orange juice and sweeten to taste.

VARIATIONS:

As above.

NOTES:

As above.

Tereré has a milder flavour than hot-brewed yerba.

Almond Yerbanada

INGREDIENTS:

• 50 g of yerba mate
• A batch of orgeat prepared according to this recipe
• 2–3 tablespoons of sugar

PREPARATION:

Prepare it in much the same way as the tereré version. Pour the cold orgeat over the yerba mate and ice cubes. Leave it in the refrigerator for an hour, strain, and sweeten if necessary.

This version is the mildest and the most nutritious.

A Little Moment at Momencik Backstage

I invented my first yerbanada during one rather eventful Sunday at Momencik (a vegan taco and burrito place—highly recommended).

The Saturday before, to quote an obscure youth band, “nothing ever went the way it should.”

The owner and I had been preparing food production from six or seven in the morning. Shortly before opening time, the girl who was supposed to work the bar called to say she was sick, had a fever, diarrhoea, every ailment imaginable, and was basically dying.

Shit happens, as philosophers say.

Not long afterwards, Feli—the owner—managed to slice his hand with a knife so badly that he nearly cut off a finger. Luckily, there was an emergency station nearby.

Unfortunately, bilocation remains the privilege of only a few saints and yogis, so running both the kitchen and the bar at once was rather difficult.

Thankfully, we managed to call Sasha in. Sasha had arrived from Moscow just a few days earlier, and his Polish wasn’t exactly great. So I took over the bar while he ran the kitchen.

And that’s how we kept going until 10 p.m.

After sorting out the cash register—and without even cleaning the dining room—I got home sometime after eleven.

At six in the morning, I was back in the kitchen.

My main thought was:

“FOR F*’S SAKE! How am I going to survive this day?”**

Necessity being the mother of invention, I bought some bagged yerba mate with lime from the shop next door, brewed it, added orange juice and sugar, and served it to the customers.

And most importantly—to myself.

All the Goodness Inside Yerbanada

Whether prepared hot or cold, yerba provides a wealth of nutrients and xanthines.

Xanthines are mild alkaloids with stimulating and relaxing properties. The best-known xanthine is caffeine, found in coffee, but yerba also contains theobromine (which is also present in cocoa and guarana) and theophylline.

It is rich in vitamins and minerals, including vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B5, C, and E, as well as calcium, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, sodium, sulphur, and zinc.

All of this works wonders for what we politely call the morning-after syndrome.

The nutritional benefits of orange juice further enhance this therapeutic effect, while sugar provides an extra energy boost.

The Tsar, the Great Emigration, and “Herwa Mate”

So what about that political and Polish history of yerba mate?

No, this isn’t about a certain barefoot “cowboy,” but about Polish emigrants in nineteenth-century Brazil.

In the mid-1800s, the Brazilian authorities began recruiting European settlers. Emigration intensified after 1888, when slavery was abolished and workers were needed on rubber plantations.

It is estimated that around 150,000 Poles emigrated to Brazil during that period.

Today, the Brazilian Polish community numbers somewhere between 1.5 and 3 million people, depending on the source.

One of those emigrants was Teofil Rudzki. He inspired Edmund Woś-Saporski, a prominent activist within the Polish diaspora in Brazil, to export yerba mate to the Russian Empire under the name “herwa mate.”

Rudzki arrived in Warsaw with a small quantity of herwa in 1882.

His efforts were so successful that by early 1883 he had imported fifty barrels of mate from Brazil.

I couldn’t find any information on how many kilograms or litres that represented, but assuming each barrel held between 30 and 50 litres doesn’t seem unreasonable.

That was an impressive amount.

Ironically, this great success marked the beginning of the end.

The sudden popularity of mate caused an equally dramatic decline in tea consumption. The main importer of Chinese tea was Count Orlov, a man closely connected to the Tsarist court.

By 1884, the Count had successfully lobbied for high tariffs on Paraguayan holly, making the entire enterprise economically unviable.

And so yerba mate had to wait more than a hundred years before finally finding its permanent home in Poland.

A lover of asparagus was Bishop Ignacy Krasicki, who threw truly Lucullan feasts at his court, and much earlier the first Roman emperor Augustus used his power to gorge himself on asparagus spears delivered by special units of the Roman army. He was also supposedly the author of the now somewhat forgotten saying “faster than asparagus cooks,” meaning something had to be done immediately and at lightning speed. Today people just say ASAP. And how are you not supposed to believe conservatives talking about the decline of language and civilization…

This year one of the bigger problems caused by the pandemic became the question: “who’s going to harvest the asparagus?” And just like there’s some country — I can’t remember which one — that has a bundle of arrows on its coat of arms, you could probably add a bundle of asparagus to the German eagle, that’s how insanely popular, almost worshipped, this vegetable is in Germany.

Well, German cuisine is one of the areas untouched by my Germanophilia. You know that story about rubber-Germans and rats? Speaking of Germanophilia…

The thing is, the local Buddhists, as part of dana practice, keep gifting us this delicacy. Which is of course a beautiful and heartwarming gesture… but on the other hand, I still have to eat the stuff! I barely survived the previous batch and another bag of asparagus already arrived. So, just like in Arnold Wesker’s play, it’s become “asparagus with everything” (or rather “asparagus for everything” — I guess that’d actually be the proper Polish equivalent of Chips with Everything).

Ingredients

• 2–3 white asparagus spears
• 1/3–1/2 block tofu
• 5–8 small oyster mushrooms
• 1–2 tbsp rice vinegar (or another aromatic vinegar)
• 1/2–1 tbsp dandelion syrup or another sweetener
• 10 larger cherry tomatoes
• fresh chili or ginger — depending on your taste
• fresh coriander

Preparation

Prep:

• Peel the asparagus and cut into 4–5 cm pieces
• Cut tofu into strips
• Finely chop the ginger and chili

Cooking:

• Throw the asparagus into hot olive oil and fry, stirring/turning so it cooks evenly on all sides. Tongs or a fork help.
• Once it starts browning, add the tofu, still stirring constantly.
• When the tofu starts browning, add the oyster mushrooms whole.
• From this point cook over low heat.
• Add the chili and ginger.
• After a minute or two add the rice vinegar, cover, and simmer for a few minutes so the oyster mushrooms soften slightly.
• Remove the lid, add the dandelion syrup, let the vinegar evaporate, and fry another 2–3 minutes to lightly caramelize the sugar.
• Add another half tablespoon of dandelion syrup and fry a little more to deepen the caramelization.
• Add the whole cherry tomatoes, cover for about 3 minutes. The goal is for the tomatoes to soften and the skin to start splitting while still staying al dente.
• Finally add the coriander, cover for one more minute.
• Remove from heat.
• Serve.

Serving

This goes wonderfully with quinoa, but boiled potatoes or mashed potatoes (I especially recommend my colorful mash) would also fit perfectly.

Variations

I used black rice vinegar in this recipe, but basically any aromatic vinegar will work, not just rice vinegar. Definitely worth experimenting here.

I also used dandelion syrup that I’d made a few days earlier and have been playing around with since, but any liquid sweetener would work — even dark sugar, especially muscovado. Date syrup could create a really interesting effect too.

What I don’t recommend are sweeteners like xylitol, because the whole point here is caramelization, and you won’t get that effect from sugar alcohols like xylitol or erythritol, or from stevia.

Notes

The important thing in this dish is balancing sourness, heat, and sweetness. So even if you don’t like spicy food, at least add a little fresh ginger — it lifts and deepens the flavor beautifully.

And since those were the gloomy, dark times of the Polish People’s Republic, when television actually deserved to be called “public” and a mission wasn’t just an empty slogan, every week late in the evening (Thursdays, I think) I’d sit down to watch retrospectives of the world’s greatest directors. Sometimes Werner Herzog — whose films had a huge impact on my innocent teenage mind — sometimes Akira Kurosawa, sometimes Federico Fellini. Though Fellini never really spoke to me. Too elaborate and too intellectual.

Ingredients

For the dish:

• 3 fairly thin slices (50 g) smoked tofu
• 4–5 fresh wild garlic leaves
• olive oil for frying
• 3–4 asparagus spears
• 1–2 tbsp nutritional yeast flakes for topping
• orange juice

(for one portion)

For the pasta:

• 500 g wheat flour
• 1 cup (250 ml) warm water
• 1 tsp salt
• 50 ml oil
• smoked salt

Method

Pasta:

Knead the flour, water, salt, and oil into a dough. I do it in a stand mixer with a dough hook attachment. Leave the dough covered with a kitchen towel for half an hour.

Tear off pieces of dough and shape them into long dumplings, slightly thicker in the middle and tapered at the ends. Cook in boiling water for 5 minutes. About 8–10 pieces per serving.

Dice the tofu fairly finely.

Finely chop the wild garlic leaves.

Heat olive oil in a pan and fry the tofu, stirring, so it browns as evenly as possible on all sides. The tofu should be lightly crispy but not hard and dried out.

Once the tofu reaches the right crispiness, add the asparagus spears. Pour in two or three tablespoons of orange juice and reduce for 2–3 minutes.

Sprinkle with the chopped wild garlic and finally add a little black salt.

And THEN GET IT OFF THE PAN AND ONTO THE PLATE IMMEDIATELY.

Arrange the dumplings on the plate, place the asparagus on top, then the tofu together with all the olive oil and sauce.

Finish with nutritional yeast flakes.

I was so focused on Losar that it only hit me yesterday that it’s Fat Thursday — so maybe I should share a recipe for the occasion.

But definitely not for doughnuts. Everyone makes doughnuts, and there’s so much damn work involved that only a fanatic makes them at home instead of going to Magda Gessler’s place or a Biedronka supermarket and buying a whole box. Sure, you’ll spend as much time in line as you would in the kitchen — but you won’t get filthy or smell like frying oil.

When I fried the specialty I prepared for you here, I did it like a complete idiot — with my experience, I should have known better — and I was doing it in my favorite Ben Sherman tracksuit (for those who don’t know: alongside Fred Perry, one of the most classic subculture brands, dating back to the 1960s mod scene).

INGREDIENTS

• 320 g flour
• 50 g margarine
• 200 g soy yogurt (or other plant yogurt)
• salt
• 30 ml apple cider vinegar

METHOD

Knead all ingredients thoroughly and for quite a long time, so the dough becomes aerated — meaning tiny air bubbles form inside it.

I do this in a planetary mixer — one of those tools I can’t imagine a kitchen without anymore. Smaller batches can be made in Thermomix-style machines, though I haven’t tested that yet. I’ll probably try it next time in my Krups.

Wrap the finished dough in plastic wrap and place it in the freezer for two hours.

After removing it, roll the dough out to about 1 mm thickness. Cut into strips and irregular pieces of different lengths and shapes.

They shouldn’t be identical — just like in a bundle of forest brushwood, there are no two identical twigs. Each piece should differ, but loosely resemble little branches.

Fry in deep oil at 150°C (302°F) — a thermometer is another very useful kitchen tool.

Drain on double or even triple layers of paper towels, top and bottom, pressing lightly to remove excess fat.

Dust through a sieve first with cocoa, then with powdered sugar. Toss to coat.

VARIATIONS

Some ideas — for you and for my future experiments:

• Colored dustings or additions to the flour besides cocoa — matcha, spirulina, darker flours — to mimic the varied colors of branches.
• Add high-protein flours (lupin, almond, etc.) to the wheat flour.
• Coat with chocolate, chill so it sets on the crust, then dust with powdered sugar.
• Make a savory, spicy version — lightly salted (not too much!) — great as a carbohydrate side instead of fries. Worth trying baked for lower fat.

I’m tempted to serve these for Losar with dipping sauces in ramekins — chocolate and something like a vegan “egg-yolk” style sauce from my Easter menu.

NOTES

Don’t leave the dough too long in the freezer, especially if there’s lots of empty space — it freezes faster then. If the outside starts turning brittle, take it out.

Alternatively, you can refrigerate it for 12 hours, which extends production time but works well.

Use ventilation, open windows, and work clothes — even small batches will make everything smell like old fryer oil.

SERVING

Pile them on a plate so they resemble a heap of brushwood — forest twigs.

WORDPLAY & CULTURAL NOTE — CHRUST vs CRUST

This recipe is built around a bilingual pun:

• Chrust — old Polish name for what are now commonly called faworki (angel wings): thin fried pastry ribbons eaten on Fat Thursday. The word literally means brushwood / twigs.
• In the 19th century, elites trying to sound French replaced the old Polish name with faworki (from French faveur — ribbon/bow).
• A plate full of them looks like a bundle of twigs — hence the original name.

My twist is Crust — spelled like the English word and referencing crust punk, one of the most extreme subgenres of punk (music and lifestyle). So:

crust → chrust → fried twig pastry

Same sound, different worlds — forest brushwood vs. punk subculture.

I don’t make the classic bow-tie shapes — partly because I always remix things my own way, and partly because tying f…g dough bows is fiddly work and I’m not into pastry handicrafts. Let’s say manual dexterity i’m good only in wanking.

Because Fat Thursday falls right before Losar, I’ll be making this Crust for 40 people. When I develop something new — snacks, bread, whatever — I usually invite everyone at the Center to test it. Their reaction decides whether the recipe gets published, added to the menu, improved, or disappears into oblivion, devoured by Cthulhu.

My boss loved the crust and said it’ll be perfect for Losar — especially since Tibetans also make fried dough for the holiday, often braided into meter-long plaits that make Polish faworki look like a first-grader’s handwriting drills next to the class overachiever’s notebook.

When I was still a young rascal, it amused me greatly that Losar often lands right around Ash Wednesday — because when Lent begins for Christians, carnival begins for me. Funny how easily that could spark a “religious conflict” — Buddhists throwing parties on Ash Wednesday, and if they’re really orthodox, celebrating through the first two weeks of Lent.

Black lentil Pate

Pears for Valentine’s Day
Tibetan Sou Thukpa

Bread and Onion Soup

Nut and Millet Cake

Savory Hazelnut Casserole

Pasta with Almond

Vegan French Toast

Soup with a Regenerative Insert

Nomilkshake

Scrambled egg-plant

Coconogg

Something Like Hummus