Soparnik – chard dish of old

Soparnik slice

Hi,
this year I successfully grew swiss chard in the container, so it’s time do do the traditional soparnik. Soparnik is a dish that dates waaay back. Like several centuries old. No one is sure how old it is, it’s been around since Ottoman empire. It’s a dish that was eaten by peasants in Poljička krajina, and it’s a simple dish, completely vegan. The most difficult thing is rolling the dough thin enough but not to thin. It is traditionally done on hearth in the ashes of apple or prune branches. But now I made it in the oven, like most of the modern day people. It does take practice to be able to cook it in the ashes. Oh and you do have to use olive oil for this recipe. It gives it extra taste

Needed for soparnik

For dough:

500g flour (gluten free flour that has some sort of gum in it, like xantan gum)
1/2 tsp salt
250ml water
50ml olive oil

Filling

500g swiss chard leaves washed and dried (it should NOT have any water on it)
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp olive oil
200g onion (i used spring onion, but actually best onion to use would be leek, to add a bit of sweetness)

Topping

2-3 cloves of garlic
2 Tbsp olive oil

Make the dough – to mixing bowl add flour, salt, water and oil. Mix or knead until it all become incorporated. If using flour that has gluten it in you need to knead it until it becomes stretchy. Then oil it a bit and set it to side. Heat the oven to 200°C.

Make the filling – strip chard leaves from stems and chop the leaves to strips. Chop the onions or leeks. If you are using spring onion like me then just cut them to strips. Use green parts as well. Add onions to chard, add salt and oil and mix to incorporate.

Then go back to the dough. Cut the dough in two pieces. First roll out one piece to 2 mm thickness and transfer it to the baking sheet. Then add the filling, but make sure to leave the 2-3 cm edge around filling. Roll out the second piece of dough to the same thickness and cover the filling. The you start rolling up the sides to seal the two edges. I’m sorry i didn’t have the time to snap the picture of rolling the sides, but you simply roll the sides till filling and pinch them a bit to secure them. Poke some holes in the top to let the steam out, and bake it in the oven until the top is nice and brown.

During the baking make the topping by chopping finely garlic cloves and adding them to the olive oil. When you take the soparnik out of the oven, smear the topping all over the top. Cut into pieces and serve. It is good hot and cold.

Some variations

This is the most basic recipe, but you can spruce it up a bit by adding fresh cheese to the filling. You can add cows cheese or better goats cheese. Also some people add parsley to the filling, to add some more flavour. I did it like the recipe, but i think that next time i will ad 1/4 tsp of salt to filling. We aren’t used to so much salt in our food, so it was a bit too salty for us. For others it would have been too little salt.

Give this recipe a try. It really isn’t that expensive, especially if you don’t use gluten free flour. And enjoy a little bit of Croatian history 🙂

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.