Pesto rolls in North African pastry

Today I had lunch at Totomato, a new healthy-eating place near Plac Konstytucji. I think the Prymitywna Kuchnia palate may simply be too unsophisticated for the taste experiences on offer there. It was an invitation to lunch, actually — I was someone’s guest — so criticising wouldn’t really be the done thing. Still…

Totomato serves two set lunches each day. A vegetarian one and a classic meat-based one. Fortunately, you can mix and match, otherwise it would have been a complete disaster. We both chose the same combination: the starter from the meat menu, Polish snails on lentils (sounds patriotic; thankfully not Chinese ones). The rest came from the vegetarian menu: pasta with tomatoes and a pancake with apple preserve and raspberry-and-tomato sauce. The snails were what I rather liked. The pasta was sour, somehow without a distinct flavour. The pancakes, on the other hand, were a disaster. Perhaps the philosophy is to leave things underseasoned. But to have so little flavour? Honestly, it was my first visit, so perhaps the place deserves another chance, but that first visit was very average in terms of taste.

And if you’re expecting to eat your fill there, you won’t. There’s very little of everything (which isn’t wrong if a place aims to attract people with refined flavours rather than portion sizes). So for me, it was tasteless and there wasn’t much of it either. And lately I’ve been terribly hungry, especially around lunchtime, and was hoping for more.

All right, that was Totomato; now for tomato-however-you-make-it. Today, for the first time in my life, I bought something called North African pastry sheets, which look like this:

They turned out to be a truly wonderful invention (something like ready-made filo pastry). Ideal for making, say, chocolate rolls in 5 minutes, and warm ones at that. Today Ninka got some of this pastry loaded with Nutella, rolled up and baked in the oven. It makes a perfect chocolate roll.

This whole paper-like stuff (actually, it resembles filo pastry) is basically something like rice paper for spring rolls, but the sheets are much larger and easier to handle because they’re very flexible, don’t tear, and so on. You can roll them up, make little parcels filled with stuffing, and bake them in the oven or apparently — I haven’t tried it — fry them in oil. You can make sweet or savoury versions. The result is similar to spring rolls, with very crisp, paper-thin pastry.

For my trial run I made something that really shouldn’t have worked, because I used green pesto, which ought, in theory, to turn bitter in the oven. Yet somehow it didn’t, and the result was quite an interesting dish. The kind where you think: have a look at what you can put together, then just do it. Now these are my kind of flavours: distinctive, not some toto-this-and-that 😉 I recommend it for the sheer pleasure of experimenting.

At a glance:

Preparation time: 5 minutes

Baking time: 20 minutes

Baking temperature: 180 degrees Celsius

Serves: 1 (you can make as many as you like; the recipe was an experiment, so I made one)

How many calories: it’s almost transparent, so probably none

Ingredients for something like a spring roll with pesto:

• 1 sheet of North African pastry (ready-made filo pastry will do; I bought mine under that name)
• a 2 cm piece of shallot
• 3 teaspoons of green pesto
• 8 cm of thin French dry-cured sausage (pork)
• a small piece of Cambozola cheese
• freshly ground black pepper 

Recipe for green pesto rolls:

I took one sheet of North African pastry and laid it on a piece of aluminium foil. I spread 3 teaspoons of green pesto over one side, working from the centre outwards. On the pesto I placed a few thin slices of Cambozola and the French sausage, cut into thin rounds.

I diced the shallot very finely and sprinkled it over the pesto-covered part of the pastry. I generously sprinkled everything with freshly ground black pepper. I rolled it up (like a pancake) and tucked the ends under (a little like a spring roll).

I put it into an oven preheated to 180 degrees Celsius and baked it for exactly 20 minutes. Then I let the roll cool slightly. The dish is ready. Enjoy!