Kutia – sweet desert for Christmas

Do you have this one dish, without which you can not imagine the holidays? Carp? Fish in Greek sauce? Borscht with dumplings? In my home, this dish is kutia.

Always prepared with grains of wheat. I already met recipes with rice, pearl barley or even pasta, but none of these substitutes will not allow to get a real kutia. Long ago, before the Internet popularized a variety of culinary traditions, on the Zaglebie (and Silesia), it was difficult to buy grains of wheat for kutia. For this reason, the week before Christmas one of us went on a trip to Krakow, where, on Kleparz or at the fair’s Christmas, buy 1kg wheat.

Now you can buy it everywhere – hypermarkets, local market, and even the corner shop has wheat on offer.

For this we throw poppy – blanched and ground. Dried fruit. Honey. Condensed milk.

And I wanted vegan kutia, so I had reason to experimentation and testing. Coconut condensed milk is no different from the dairy one. Even work takes exactly the same. You can use this recipe or (if you feel like almond milk) this one.

You can also hunt a can into a health food store (expensive and hard available). But homemade done will not be so sweet – you decide on the amount of sugar.

I replaced the honey with fig syrup and date syrup. The first comes from the jar of candied figs, I bought second (of course in a health food store). You can also use any other syrup – maple syrup from cane or candied fruit. Your kutia will benefit from this unimaginable. Or you can use honey.

And,as I’ve betrayed all the secrets, I present you the recipe. Bon Appetit 🙂

Ingredients (for approx. 1l kutia):

0.5 kg of poppy seeds

30 grams of wheat grains

30 grams of nuts and dried fruit – dates, figs, raisins, candied figs, almonds (blanched), hazelnuts, walnuts

0.5 cups of syrup of date and fig

condensed coconut/almond milk

Preparation:

• Wheat rinse with cold water, put it into a bowl, pour the cold water and leave overnight.
• The next day, change water and cook the wheat until tender (approx. 20 minutes).
• Poppy rinse with cold water, then pour boiling water and cook, covered, for approx. 20 minutes.
• Grind poppy seeds 2 – 3 times in a food processor with a fine strainer.
• Cut dried fruits and nuts.
• Poppy seeds, wheat and chopped dried fruit mix.
• Add the syrups and a spoon of milk. Mix.
• If necessary, add more milk – if consistency of kutia is too compact, but the kutia is too sweet, instead of condensed milk, add coconut cream.

Kutia can be prepared in advance and stored in the refrigerator for a few days – but in this case do not add milk. Add the milk just before serving kutia.

Bon Appetit 🙂