Plăcintă is a special pie with cottage cheese, pimpkin, meat, potato, apples and other kinds of filling. Plăcintă looks like a flat cake, and it’s cooked from puff pastry or yeasted dough.

My grandma used to fry plăcintăs on a dry frying pan, and then brushed ready-made plăcintăs with butter. People cook like that in Bessarabia and it tastes gorgeous! Even now I remember delicious flavour of those flat pies that were burning my fingers when I grabbed them straight from a frying pan.

Moldavian chef Denys Brovchak cooks plăcintă in an absolutely different way, Denys’s recipe resembles culinary traditions of Moldova. He kneads yeasted dough for pies according to all rules, and the dough should “rest” well.  Plăcintăs should be baked in the oven, not fried.

I adore pies with cottage cheese, bot salty and sweet, and I never get bored of this rich and tasty filling. It’s possible to play with the shades of taste and change it completely. So in Denys’s recipe salty cottage cheese, chopped greens and eggs match perfectly with light dough.

Placinta with Cottage Cheese and Greens
 
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Recipe type: Main Dishes
Cuisine: Moldavian Cuisine
Ingredients
Dough:
  • 50 g yeast
  • 250 ml warm water
  • 30 g sugar
  • 700 g flour
  • 1 egg
  • 2 g salt
  • 10 g vegetable oil for frying
Filling:
  • 1 kg of low-fat cottage cheese
  • 2 eggs
  • Greens to taste - parsley or dill
Instructions
Dough:
  1. Mix the yeast, 3-4 tbs o flour, 100 ml of water and sugar
  2. Set the dough in a warm place for 10-15 minutes
  3. Add the egg, salt and remaining water in the dough and gradually add the remaining flour and knead the dough
  4. Let the dough “rest” for 1 hour
Filling:
  1. Mix the cottage cheese with chopped greens and eggs
  2. Season with salt and mix it once again
How to bake plăcintăs
  1. Roll out the dough into a thin layer
  2. Spread the filling over it
  3. Fold it as an envelope
  4. Put plăcintăs on a baking sheet, brushed with oil
  5. Bake in preheated oven (200⁰S) about 8 minutes

Baked plăcintă with cottage cheese and greens from Moldovan chef Denys Brovchak. Well-roasted, solid and yummy! Light yeasted dough and delicious cottage cheese filling!

In 2014, the Moldovan cooks baked a plăcintă of 50 m long. It was baked in a large frying pan of about 2 meters in diameter, the frying pan was placed on burning coals. This record-beaking plăcintă was filled  with nuts and apples. Moldovan cooks are real and true masters! Knowingly recipes from Moldovan chefs are popular not only in the country but also in many other countries. There is a good reason that Moldovan chefs’ recipes are famous and wide-spread not only in Moldova, but in many other countries.