Buchty (sg. buchta) are Czech dessert pastry made from yeast dough and filled with one of the traditional fillings – povidla, cottage cheese tvaroh, poppy seed or marmalade.
Buchty, sometimes called Honzovy buchty after Honza, the character from a Czech fairy-tale who went into the world with nothing but a package of his mother’s buchty, are a Czech pastry that found its way into several countries of the central-European region. The yeast dough used for buchty is the same like for koblihy, although the latter dessert is fried while buchty is baked.
In broader sense of the word, buchta is used as a general term for many kinds of sweet baked pastry like táč, bábovka, štrůdl, tarts…
Buchty – Recipe
Ingredients
For the dough:
- 400 g/14.1 oz of all-purpose flour or hladká mouka – see the Czech Flour Guide
- 1 egg
- 40 g/1.4 oz of fresh yeast or 1 heaping tsp of dried yeast
- 200 ml/6.8 oz of warm milk
- 70 g/2.5 oz of sugar
- 60 g/2.1 oz of melted butter + more for glazing
- pinch of salt
- powder sugar for sprinkling
- optional: 1 tbsp of Czech rum (Tuzemák)
For the filling:
- Povidla
- Tvaroh: mix 250 g/8.8 oz of fresh cottage cheese of quark type with 1 egg and sugar to taste, you can add grated lemon zest
- Poppy seed filling: place 200 g/7.1 oz of poppy seed, 100 g/3.5 oz of powder sugar and 150 ml/5.1 oz of milk in a saucepan and simmer for 5 minutes. Let cool down completely.
How to make Buchty
Pour the warm milk in a bowl, break the yeast into pieces and add it to the milk. Add 1 tsp of sugar and 1 tsp of flour and stir a little. Let it rest in a warm place (cover the bowl) for 15 minutes or until it forms bubbles on top.
Meanwhile, sift the flour into a large bowl. Add a pinch of salt and all the sugar, mix a little. Add the starter that you’ve prepared with the yeast, 1 egg and butter. Knead well until the dough is smooth and lightly sticky. If you need to add flour because it’s too sticky, add it little by little. For a ball and let the dough rest in a covered bowl until it rises and at least doubles its volume.
Place the dough on a table sprinkled with flour.
Take a handful of the dough, form a ball, then flatten it and stretch a little. Place some filling in the center, close the dough and form a ball again.
Place in a baking tray and glaze with melted butter. Repeat these steps for the rest of the dough, pressing the pieces to each other in the baking tray.
Preheat the oven to 170°C/338°F and bake for 40 minutes. Glaze with melted butter (you can mix in the rum) and when cold, sprinkle with powder sugar.
