Here is a traditional recipe for pěry – delicious dumplings with plum marmelade povidla and ground poppyseed like from a Czech babička.
Pěry are a real comfort food. They are fluffy, sweet and they smell great. They give you this warm feeling and might easily become your guilty pleasure.
What are pěry?
Pěry are yeast dumplings filled with povidla and coated in ground poppyseed and powder sugar. The name povidla is sometimes translated as “plum marmelade”, however, it isn’t quite correct. Povidla don’t contain any gelling agent and no or only very little sugar. They are made by cooking or baking very ripe plums very slowly until they become a kind of a dense mash.
How to make pěry
You can find the complete and detailed recipe for this delicacy here, the credit for the recipe goes to the Creative Mom.
Ingredients
For 6 knedliky although that would be very little for my family:)
For the dough
– 20 g of active yeast
– 125 ml of lukewarm milk
– 150 g of flour (plus more for later)
– pinch of salt
For the filling and topping
– povidla or plum jam
– 1 cup of ground poppy seeds
– 1/2 cup of powder sugar
The yeast is really important here, it gives the dough this typical smell without which it’s not really knedlíky.
The flour should be what we call here semi-coarse or coarse (bigger grain than plain flour) but if you can’t get it in your country, just use plain or all-purpose flour.
Povidla could be a real tough thing to get if you’re not in Central Europe but you can use any thicker plum jam or marmalade (although it’s not quite the same). Let me just explain what it is: Povidla are made from ripe fresh plums, the process takes several hours where you bake the fruit and melt it slowly in a pot. The fruit has to be very very ripe and you don’t add sugar or really very little. The result is a very thick marmelade kind of mass that is absolutely delicious. See the photo to get an idea of what povidla looks like.
Poppy seeds – a very traditional ingredient in the Czech cuisine, we use it a lot, mainly in desserts but also for bread and other pastry. I know poppy seeds are prohibited in some countries because they’re the main ingredient for making opium but I can assure you that you can’t get intoxicated in any way by eating them (or maybe if you eat kilos of them every day but I don’t think that’s humanly possible).
Pěry – recipe
First make the sourdough. Put the lukewarm milk in a bowl and place the yeast in it. You can add half a teaspoon of sugar to help the yeast get active but it’s not necessary. Cover the bowl with a clean rug and let it grow in a warm place for 15 minutes.
Then add the flour and salt and knead until you get smooth and lightly sticky dough (if it’s too sticky even after you work on it actively for at least 5 minutes, add a little flour). Cover the bowl again and let the dough rest until it doubles in volume (30 – 60 minutes).
Sprinkle flour on your working table.
Take small parts of the grown dough (I usually take a full tablespoon) and form it into a small kind of a pancake. Actually, the size of this depends on you, I would say mine fit into my hand.
Put a full teaspoon of povidla in the middle of each pancake.
Close the knedliky pressing the edges of the pancake together.
Turn them upside down and let them rest for another 15 minutes, they will grow a little bit.
Meanwhile prepare the poppy mixture, just mix the seeds with the sugar in a bowl.
Boil a big pot with water. When you place the knedliky in the water, it has to be boiling already.
Close the pot with a lid and boil them for 15 minutes. If you don’t have a lid, boil them for 10 minutes, then turn them around and boil for another 5 minutes.
Take them out and place them immediately in the bowl with the poppy seeds and coat them completely.
And that’s it, you’re done. Knedliky are served hot but they are delicious also cold as long as you coat them with the sugar and poppy seeds while they’re still hot. Enjoy the rest of the photos to work up your appetite!
Are you craving more Czech delicacies? Get inspired by our traditional Czech recipes or read about the Czech food and beverages!
