I'm Jeffrey Yoskowitz. I am the owner of the Gefilteria.

I'm the author of the "Gefilte Manifesto Cookbook", and I've had the pleasure of attending the TISZ Festival last Fall and spending a lot of time in Warsaw and in Poland. And it's really a treat to be speaking to you, cooking with you, all the way from my home in Brooklyn, New York. Today, we're going to make one of my favourite dishes, one of the most classic Jewish deli dishes, and that's kasha varnishkes. Now kasha varnishkes is very familiar.

There are many kasha dishes. Its roasted buckwheat, what we specifically call kasha.

And this is a dish, it's kasha essentially, with noodles, with classic bowtie noodles.

It will not be something that is too unfamiliar,

but there's a lot of special New York little twists that make it an immigrant food here in Brooklyn where I live. So I did a few things beforehand. I already made the bow tie noodles. I already cooked some onions and mushrooms together with some salt and pepper to give that flavour. So I have those ready. So what we're going to do is, we're just going to make the kasha, and then we're going to put it all together. But it's an opportunity for me to tell you a bit more about this dish. So first things first. I'm using the pan I already used to cook the onions and mushrooms, and I want to keep that flavor in.

I'm going to heat this pan. I'm going to get it on a medium high here. And I'm going to heat this pan up And I'm going to... While I do that.... I'm going to take my kasha and I'm going to do this trick-it's a simple trick. In my bowl here I have some some egg and I'm going to, essentially, put this kasha in with the egg and I'm going to mix it together. Now, this coating of the egg kernels... now this is something which when I was in Poland, I asked people: "do you do this?" But I didn't get conclusive answers? But from what I understand is that the quality of the of the buckwheat groats is much lower here. And this is a way of enriching the kasha. And you add a little bit more texture, more substance, more flavour this way. Well, I have used buckwheat that I've purchased-raw buckwheat or roasted buckwheat from Poland- and I haven't needed at all to use this egg method. So it's just something to keep in mind that, you know, a lot of what Ashkenazi Jewish food traditions are in America and United States are just attempts to recreate the foods, the traditions, the tastes of the old country, of Poland. And so that's one of the things I love about learning. As I learned about my own cuisine, my own culture, I learned a lot about my family's past. All of my grandparents come from Poland. So I'm continually, continually learning about life before the war. So I'm going to take this buckwheat that has been enriched with egg.

I'm going to put it on a hot pan. And we're going to do is kind of further roast this kasha. I'm going to further roast it to get all this moisture out of this kasha.

I'm going to basically get it ready to add to the hot broth on. So this is the toasting it. You know, when I make rice, I actually toast my rice as well. And it just really brings out the flavours. You know, buckwheat itself is obviously often raw, but I'm here in the States where it's mostly available, pre-roasted. It's actually hard to find raw buckwheat. But when you give it a fresh roast, it sort of brings out some of the nuttiness, some of those flavours. So I'm going to move it around so it doesn't get stuck to the pan. My pan is quite hot, so I'm going to turn it down a little bit. And yeah. So this, you know, one of those things about buckwheat is, you know, when I first visited Poland, I visited in 2014 for the first time. I went with my father. We visited a town where his parents were from in Poland. And, you know, we also spent time in Warsaw and Krakow. I went to the Krakow culture festival and I was amazed at how much buckwheat I was eating. And it's interesting because kasha and this dish that I'm making, kasha varnishes are such a classic. It's such a classic Jewish deli food, but it's not very common. It's very rare, in fact, to find buckwheat served this way-buckwheat groats. Usually it's just buckwheat flour and buckwheat pancakes, in a French style. I'm going to interrupt my thought, because this is actually looking quite nice and dry. Let's see if I can give a little... you can take a look here. You can see some steam coming off it. I'm going to go quickly and get my broth, which has been cooking.

So I have a nice hot broth. I'm going to mix this in. There we go.

And so I love cooking with heat. I love putting already hot broths...

I've got to put a lid on here... this is not the perfect play, but it's going to work. I want to turn this down just a smidge-

just a little bit. But I'm going to let this cook. Now, I think just add broth. This was a chicken broth, but I actually use a little bit of oil in there as well, a little bit of salt and pepper that I'm now going to cook this kasha down with. So what I was saying was, oh, I visited Poland. I was shocked to find that there was kasha, there was buckwheat everywhere. And it made me feel like this was a place, a familiar flavuor, a place that I felt was home. And actually, since I came back from Poland, I've been making more and more kasha dishes, cooking, filling my stuffed cabbages with kasha, making vegetarian versions. I've been just making more kasha pilafs. You know, sort of like rice, with lots of different nuts and fruits. I've been doing that with kasha as well-I took a lot of kasha inspiration. However, the Jewish deli, you know, these amazing places in New York City that served, you know, pastrami sandwiches and corned beef sandwiches and all sorts of dishes that were emerging from a lot of Ashkenazi culture from around the world. The Jewish deli does kasha varnishkes really well. And their secret ingredient is chicken schmaltz. So it's a chicken-rendered chicken fat. Oh, I'm just going to actually put my timer on, so I don't forget. We let this go for, honestly, just about seven minutes, not much longer. It's not going to take too much time for all of this to absorb. And so I want to make sure we... seven to ten minutes, we're going to check it. Nice thing about having a clear lid as I'm able to take a look and see. But so the Jewish deli does it right. It really does.

The chicken schmaltz, it's greasy and it has so much flavour to it. It often has caramelized onions mixed in. So what I'm doing now is just making a dish which is going to be sort of homage to the Jewish deli. The Jewish deli in America-many of them have closed. There aren't that many left and there aren't that many that do it really well. And so today, due to my lack of schmaltz right now, we are making a vegetarian... Well, I guess I have a chicken broth, so we're not making a full vegetarian...but we're making a non schmaltzy kasha varnishes. But if you use you use oil or use butter, you can, you know, recreate some of that. But I just try to recommend: don't be short on the oil. And I added a little bit of oil to my broth. And I added a little bit of... a good amount of oil when I cook down my onions and mushrooms, which is going to add some of that moisture. The biggest problem with this dish is when the dish is dry, a dry kasha varnishkes, is honestly,... No one wants anything to do with it. So, yeah. So part of that experience of being a Jewish chef in New York and going to Eastern Europe and having that Ashkenazy Eastern European background is to find and discover that there's so much shared heritage that remains. So my favorite example is... my... one of my inspirations. One of the reasons why I started the Gefilteria, and wrote a cookbook called The Gefilte Manifesto, was because of a dish called gefilte fish. And this is one of the classic, you know, Ashkenazi Jewish dishes. You eat it for the holidays.

My family, we ate it every New Year, in on Rosh Hashanah and every Passover. And there's all these stories in New York City of families that used to keep a live fish in their bathtub, you know, for the holiday. And there's even a children's book called "The Carp in the Bathtub", about the carp that, you know, was part of the family and then became the good gefilte fish. And when I-I think it was my second or third trip to Poland, I learned that, in fact, the carp, that tradition, lived on, and in fact is part of the Christmas tradition. And families made a version of gefilte fish, a Jewish-style carp for Christmas. And it really moved me. It made me realize that there's so much shared culture, shared heritage, and it made me start to really think about the Polish side of my identity more than... you know... here in New York. I think of myself as mostly just a Jewish New Yorker with you know, Eastern European roots. And I realized how much I have in common. And I really appreciated that. OK, so I'm looking at the kasha. I'm seeing it start to absorb and start to... I'm smelling the nuttiness. Oh, you know, the kasha with the mushrooms, we're going to add, and some of these earthy flavors and that's something... It is a good kind of heaviness to that... that I love. In fact, I, you know, I love Mediterranean cuisine. I love other other kinds of cuisine. There's something about the connection to the ground, to the earth, the horseradish, the mushrooms, even the kasha, that I think it's incredibly special. OK, so we're at about three minutes, but I think even in about two minutes, I still see some liquid. But we're going to see... We're doing well...

We're doing really well.

So the other piece of this I want to talk about is the varnishes. So what are varnishes? People don't actually know the origin of that word. But here in New York, the varnishke element to the kasha varnishkes is actually a bow-tie noodle. So these noodles, which you might think of, if you know, by the Italian name: Farfalle, they are critical to the dish. Some people say unless you're using a bow tie noodle, you can't make kasha varnishes.

Now, if you look into the history and you interrogate it, you actually find that, in fact, you know, the bow-tie noodles were something that were pretty common in the Italian sections of New York City, which in the old days, in the turn of the century, there were Italians and there were Jews living side by side. It would make sense that there would be this concept. But back in Poland, it was, to be honest, likely just the typical egg noodles, the noodles that were very common in Jewish cooking, in Polish cooking. And so whether or not that's authentic, it remains to be seen. But if you go to a Jewish deli, you expect the bow-tie noodle. And what this dish is, is just a mixture of your grain and pasta. But really, what then distinguishes it is the... the... whatever else you mix in. So today I'm going to use mushrooms.

Whenever I'm talking to a Polish crowd, I need to think about mushrooms because that's something that's missing in Polish- Jewish cooking here in the US. We don't really think about... we don't have a mushroom culture. We don't go to the forest and forage. We just don't have that knowledge. And so it's something that I've taken away and really learned about. In fact, actually, I keep with me some of the boletus mushrooms that I brought back with me from Warsaw. And I use these for cooking because that was just something that's missing. I found missing in Jewish cooking today. I just turned it off as we are just about going to take a quick look. This is looking good, I think, in a minute, and we are going to be in business. So I just wanted to take a look to see if there's a little bit of moisture left. He really is hydrating. The steam is bringing these kasha kernels to life. Now, I have tried making this dish, by the way, with kasha, with buckwheat, though which has not been roasted. And it's a little bit mushy. It's going to it's going to lack the same fluffy texture that is critical to making kasha varnishkes as a success.

So we're going to we're going to have to stick with stick with the roasted buckwheat for now. But so, yes, so this one, stay with mushrooms. So you can really mix anything in it. For some reason, kasha varnishkes has just stayed bland and the same. It's been noodles and kasha. So when I was doing my cookbook, "The Gefilte Manifesto", we, the cookbook author and I, and Lyz, we decided to make a kasha varnishkes that had brussel sprouts. We just wanted to see some color, some green. And in fact, you can mix in cabbage, you can mix in other vegetables. There's no reason that you can't. The only reason people don't is because of tradition. And when the delis are closing down, a lot of people are no longer cooking these traditional foods anymore, in the Jewish community. And so there's a fear that if you play with them or mess with them, you're completely destroying the authentic nature of it. You're destroying something quintessential about the dish.

And so as a result of that, you can hear the sirens behind me outside in New York. But because of that fear of diluting the authenticity of a dish, you end up not really changing or evolving the dish at all. So even adding mushrooms, which I'm doing, is unorthodox. You would typically just do onions and sometimes maybe you'd mixed in what we would call in Yiddish gribines, which would be fried chicken-skins, which I often only find done with goose-skins. So I'm going to shut this off now.

Take a look here and let's take a look. OK, look, that is looking beautiful. See if you can see this here.

It's looking nice and fluffy. I added a little bit of salt to this as well.

Very nice.

So normally I'd let this cool down a little bit before you mix everything in, but for the sake of this video and for the sake of keeping time, we're going to mix everything in right now.

So here is my mix of mushrooms and onions. And I wish I could tell you, I had some great fresh mushrooms from the forest, but these are from the supermarket.

They're a little bit boring. But here I have some salt and pepper in here as well. And I'm going to mix that. I going to mix this in.

And honestly, the more mushrooms and onions, the better, you can rarely have too few. I just kind of sort of roughly chop these mushrooms. But, you know, I'd actually like to do them nice and thin. Sometimes I think it adds to the textural experience if I have smaller mushrooms. But these are large. So I just did these sort of rough chunks and it's starting to smell beautiful. I just want to show you what we got here. Very nice. OK now, first, the next thing I want to do is a little bit of dill in. And this is not very common in the delis of New York. People don't love dill, but for me, I want a little bit of green and I want that connection to those Eastern European flavors, and a little bit of dill... I think goes a long way. And now a final bit. The bow-tie noodles. This is what's going to make it not just a kasha dish, but a kasha varnishkes. And I am going to mix this in here. And how much kasha versus varnishkes - those are the noodles you put in. Again, varnishes doesn't necessarily translate to noodle directly. In fact, we're not really sure of the origin of the word, but it really depends on your preference. I tend to prefer more kasha, less noodle, but I know some people who don't really like the taste of kasha, but they love this dish and, for them, it's because it's a pasta dish with a little bit of something extra. So I'm going to it mix a little bit more of this in... Oh!... I'm smelling all of these familiar smells. I feel like I am at my favourite place on Earth, the Jewish deli. I really love that Jewish deli. I wish that there was something like it in Poland, and one could experience. If you come to New York, you've got to go to Katz's or the Second Avenue Jewish Deli, my favourite-which I'm not supposed to play favourites-my favourite is the Mill Basin Deli in Brooklyn, right by the beach and...

I'm just going to show you our kasha varnishkes. Here we go! This is a taste of New York City, of the Jewish deli, which is an amalgamation of flavours and tastes from Eastern Europe.

I'm going to get a spoon and we're going to taste it.

This is fantastic. This is amazing.

I want to emphasize, when you're salting, make sure you salt the water for the noodles, make sure you salt a mushroom and your mixture and make sure your salt the kasha over the broth that's going to go in to the kasha, because I salted all those three. It's coming through. It is so flavorful. Even though there's no schmaltz, it is moist enough. But I made sure to put enough oil in. I really - I used more oil than I thought would be necessary for the onions and mushrooms so I can mix that oil in after. And if for whatever reason it's tasting a little dry, or it dries up a little bit, adding a little bit of oil, or if you have a little bit of schmaltz... I know in Poland, many of you might have goose schmaltz, goose-fat, mix some of that in. But right now this doesn't need any of that. This is really, really good. Well, I hope you have a wonderful festival. What a pleasure to get to present with you, to be with you and get to make one of my favourite dishes. You can follow the Gefilteria. We cook and travel around the world. Right now we're mostly doing virtual programs at Gefilteria on Instagram. You can follow me at Jeff Yasko. And I hope to see all of you in Poland soon. And I hope you get to eat with all of you because it's one of my favourite things to do when I visit. So thank you so much.