Quark?

Hungarian Quark Pogacsa Recipe
250 g flour
250 g butter
250 g quark
1 teaspoon salt
grated emmentaler cheese
1 egg

Preheat oven to 200°C.
Knead a dough out of flour, butter, quark and salt.
Roll out and fold it 3 times. Roll out again.
With a cutter cut small circles and smear egg on top and sprinkle with some grated cheese.
Bake for 15 minutes.

How would you go about making this recipe? Let me tell you how an over-ambitious inexperienced cook would make these as a thank you for her substitute teachers:

First, start by researching what "quark" is and what "emmentaler cheese" is. According to Wikipedia:

Quark (or qvark) is a fresh cheese of East European origin. Dictionaries usually translate it as curd cheese. It is soft, white and un-aged, similar to fromage frais. It is not the same thing ascream cheese or cottage cheese.

Emmentaler is a yellow, medium-hard cheese, with characteristic large holes. It has a piquant, but not really sharp taste.

Next, go across the street to a small convenience store to find these items. I decided the easiest way to find these was to look for something disgusting that I couldn't identify...quark? I brought home two weird looking, white mush things. I abandoned the emmentaler cheese and decided to just use the white cheese my roommate and I usually eat.

Now try to decipher the measurements and mix together. Bake and remove from oven.

When I got them out, they looked a little bit flat and didn't taste exactly as I expected. They weren't as flaky as those that I buy, but they were okay. Then I decided to try another recipe. This one was a bit more recognizable:

2 Cups all purpose flour
3 egg yolks
3 sticks butter or margarine (cut in chunks for easier blending)
1/2 C sour cream
1 tsp salt
2 tsp baking powder
1 beaten egg yolk for brushing tops of biscuits

Preheat oven to 400. (Convection does a beautiful job!)

Place all ingredients in bowl of heavy duty mixer with the dough hook attachment. Begin mixing on slow speed and mix until the ingredients are well blended and dough forms sort of a ball. The mixer does a great job of blending. (Alternatively, you can blend ingredients by hand and knead well (making a nice smooth dough).

Remove to a floured board and knead a few times by hand to check for smoothness. Add flour only if neeed to keep from sticking to the board. You may still see chunks of butter not completely blended.

Roll out to 1/4 inch thick rectangle. Carefully fold bottom half of dough to the middle, then the top half to the middle. Fold the left side to the middle and then the right side to the middle. Place dough in fridge to rest for minimum of 15 minutes. After 15 minutes roll out again and repeat the folding process. Chill again for at least 15 minutes. Some classic recipes suggest repeating this two more times. I had the problem of finding the biscuits a bit dry perhaps due to adding more flour with each folding. They seemed perfect after two foldings.

Roll out dough to about 1/2 inch thickness. Cut bicuits with a metal biscuit cutter and roll each one between your fingers to make them slightly taller. At this point you can prepare for baking and freeze them. They puff up much better if they come directly from the freezer.

To freeze: Place the pogacsas on a floured platter or tray that will fit in your freezer and freeze. When frozen, place in plastic bags until ready to use.

To bake: Preheat oven to 400. Use convection setting if you have it. When oven is preheated, remove pogacsas from freezer and place on cookie sheet. Brush tops with beaten egg and bake at 400 for 10 minutes, then reduce heat to 350 and bake until golden brown, about 5 more minutes. Serve immediately and they will disappear immediately!

This time, the ingredients went smoother. Unfortunately, one egg yolk was lost to the sink as I dropped it while separating.
Also, if you know anything about my lack of patience, you won't be surprised to know that I didn't really want to roll, freeze, roll, and refreeze 10 million times. I made the educated decision to skip this step and just bake the dough :-)

While this recipe didn't have the yummy cheese, they puffed up better and were quite tasty!

You will see a picture of what pogacsa are supposed to look like (found online) and a plate of what mine looked like. Not bad! Hope my substitutes like them! Go ahead, try to make them...you know you want to!