Russian Fried Dessert Cheese Balls Recipe
It sounds like something that the Americans would have come up with: combine together sugar, eggs, vanilla, flour, and a huge quantity of some doubtless extremely right and probably artery-clogging cheese... and then proceed to fry it. The result is well, delicious in my opinion, with a creamy white cheese interior surrounded by the fried exterior, rich and decadent, sweet and soft and hard all at once. Astonishingly simple too, just a matter of mixing together some ingredients, making balls of cheese, and frying it. But being an American, I couldn't quite resist going one step further, and as compared to the original Russian recipe where the cheese balls were sautéd, I figured, why not go all the way and proceed to deep fry them? The results I thought, turned out even better than the original, although I must admit that they are probably even more unhealthy....
Ingredients
- 10 ounces quark, (specifically tvorog cheese)
- 4 tablespoons vanilla sugar
- 1/3 cup sugar
- 1 cup flour
- 2 eggs
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
Instructions
- In a medium bowl, combine together the cheese (remove any excess water if it is still present), vanilla sugar, salt, flour, eggs and sugar. Beat together until smooth and uniform.
- Allow it to rest for some 30 minutes. At the end of 30 minutes, add in additional flour if the dough is still too wet
- In a boiling vessel of desired size, heat the oil over high heat, with sufficient depth to deep fry the cheese balls which should be, say, golf-ball sized. When it is very hot, and a drop of the dough dropped in fizzles and bubbles merrily, proceed to drop in round balls of the dough. Fry for several minutes, agitating them with a slotted spoon, until the balls are crispy and have begun to turn brown, but not blackened. Then remove with the same slotted spoon, draining the oil off, and eating while preferably still warm.
© 2019 Ryan Thomas
