Boning Up on Kazakh Baking

An Assorti Primer

By Johnisha M. Levi

Assorti Pie

Café Assorti’s wide selection of Central Asian sweet and savory pastries may be a little daunting, but here is a roadmap designed to help you wisely navigate the overflowing pastry cases. With the exception of the Cheburek, these are all baked to a tawny glowing finish.

Assorti Pie: This large baked pastry is shaped and proportioned like the traditional Ashkenazic Jewish cylindrical pastry, the knish. It is filled with a combination of beef, eggs, tomatoes and cheese.

Cheburek: This crescent-shaped, pan-fried Uzbek pastry is traditionally made with beef, but also available with a pepper-jack cheese and spinach filling. It makes an ideal soup or salad side.

Pirozhok: A baked pastry similar to the Polish pierogi in size. Comes in different shapes to distinguish the following fillings: egg and onions, ground beef and onion, cabbage (with sesame seed garnish), and spiced potato. These also come in one sweet flavor, apple.

Rasstegai: The name for these baked pastries derives from the Russian word, rasstyognutyi, meaning “unfastened,” because the tops of the pastries are usually slightly agape, revealing the filling. Choose from beef and potatoes, fish (tilapia or salmon; with black pepper “fish eyes”) or vegetable (cabbage, potatoes and carrots).

Samsa: A baked pastry triangular or square in shape. Filled with your choice of ground beef, chicken and mushroom or turkey and mushroom.

Vatrushka: This is exclusively sweet, and is filled with either fruit or sweet cheese and raisins. The sweet cheese filling is a traditional flavor that you will see across the Assorti menu in the sweet cheese pie, the sweet cheese pancakes, in croissants and the rose pastry (the latter, a spiraled pastry resembling the petal layers of its namesake flower, glazed in meringue).

Looking to venture beyond the desserts and the savory/sweet pastries at Café Assorti? Here are other additional creations guaranteed to reward your inner explorer.

Breakfast

The Sweet Cheese Pancake: “This is a blintz-enthusiast’s dream” was my first thought upon popping a forkful. The creamy “white cheese” is low in water content, with the most delicate of curds and therefore most comparable to ricotta. It is like eating a blintz Oreo cookie-style—all filling sans wrapper, but with a browned and crisp exterior. The experience is only heightened by the addition of both sour cream and house-made mixed berry jam. And the best part of it is that you can order this breakfast item until late in the afternoon (3-4 p.m.).

Lunch

Salad: The vitamin salad was a bit of a nod to the neighborhood demographic and Courthouse-Clarendon’s athletes and vegetarians. The colorful medley of shredded apples, cucumbers, cabbage and carrot may be light on calories but is surprisingly satisfying (no pity party here for the flesh-averse). The salad is full of texture, and the natural sweetness of the apples and carrots marry well with the more demure cucumbers and cabbage.

Dinner
Manti: three to a plate, these large, fist-sized steamed dumplings grip a filling of ground beef and finely diced butternut squash (the latter in place of the more traditionally Kazakh pumpkin). They are served with your chose of either red sauce or the creamed-based pink sauce (a little like a light version of penne a la vodka and equally as addictive). Don’t eat meat? Try the varenki—smaller ravioli-sized steamed dumplings stuffed with your choice of potato or cabbage.

Galabuci: Whether you pronounce it with a soft c or a hard c (Russian versus Polish), this stuffed cabbage by any other name will taste just as sweet. Each leafy mass is generously packed with beef and rice and just how your mother never made it (or my mother at least). The smell of cabbage made me run the other way as a kid, but one bite of this tender mouthful of beef with its melt in the mouth wrapper of tender cabbage smothered in a light tomato sauce is enough to convert any kid for life.

Beverage

Kompot: Assorti’s house refresher gives new meaning to looking at life through rose colored glasses. Order a cold tall glass of this house-made berry elixir (reduced from fresh berries and apples) and you can’t help but feel a bit more carefree and optimistic. Curious about the difference between this and another house drink, the kisel? The latter is more viscous—General manager Ben Slocum describes it as JELL-O-like—as it is thickened with potato starch.

Tags: food, Northern Virginia, Northern Virginia Magazine, NoVA