Home › Cakes, Puddings, and Pastry › Tcheureks
Tcheureks
(Greek Easter Cakes.) These are also sold on the street at the season, during Passion and Holy Weeks.
Mix 4 1/2 ounces butter with an equal amount of sugar, add 5 eggs well beaten, 1 cup of milk, 2 ounces yeast, and 10 ounces of flour. Let it rise for 2 hours, form into shape of a large fleur-de-lis, or 3-pointed flower,--to represent the Trinity,--ice with sugar, and bake 1 hour.
A sweet yeasted Easter bread written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew what the dough should feel like. The proportions as printed will not behave, so read the flour note before you start.
- The flour is shortTen ounces of flour cannot absorb 5 eggs, a cup of milk and 4 1/2 oz butter — that gives a pourable batter, not something you can shape into a fleur-de-lis. A shapeable enriched dough with this much liquid wants roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb of flour; the figure in the original is either a typographical slip or assumes a further addition the writer took for granted. Add flour until the dough is soft but holds a shape.
- Two ounces of yeastThis is fresh compressed yeast, sold in cakes at the time. Two ounces of fresh yeast is equivalent to about 2 tablespoons of active dry or a little under 2 tablespoons of instant — a heavy dose, which is why two hours suffices for such a rich dough.
- No oven temperature givenFor a large enriched loaf, 350F is right; the sugar and egg will colour fast, so tent with foil once the crust is deep brown. An hour is plausible for one big bread but far too long for individual buns, which need 20-25 minutes.
- Test by temperature, not timeEnriched doughs read as done on the outside well before the crumb sets. The centre should reach 190-195F.
- The riseTwo hours is one bulk rise. Shape after it, then let the shaped bread prove again until visibly puffed — the original may assume this second rise rather than stating it, and skipping it gives a dense, tight crumb.
- "Ice with sugar"In practice this means brushing with beaten egg and scattering coarse sugar before baking, or a thin sugar-and-water glaze applied after. A wet icing put on before an hour in the oven will scorch.
- Butter and sugar by weight4 1/2 ounces of butter is a little over a stick; 4 1/2 ounces of sugar is about 2/3 cup. Weighing is worth it here, since the balance of fat to flour decides whether the crumb is bread or cake.
- YieldOne large shaped bread, serving 8 to 10, or about a dozen individual buns.
Tcheureks is one of many transliterations of what Greek bakers call tsoureki, a name generally traced to the Turkish çörek, a word for a sweet or enriched bread that travelled widely through the Ottoman world and turns up in Armenian choreg and Balkan cognates as well. The bread belongs to the end of the Lenten fast: butter, eggs and milk are exactly the foods given up for forty days, so a loaf built from all three is a statement about the fast breaking. The three-pointed shape for the Trinity noted here is one of several traditional forms — braiding three strands is the more common practice, and modern versions are usually scented with mahlepi (ground cherry-pit kernels) and mastic, aromatics this recipe omits. The cakes are recorded as being hawked in the street during Holy Week, a detail that places the loaf in the market as much as in the kitchen.