Kazan — summer 2014

The main dish I cook most often here in Russia is a mixture of ground meat, cabbage and spices. The Russians might call this stuff бигос or бигус (bigos or bigus). Properly speaking, bigus is made with both fresh cabbage and sauerkraut, some kind of meat, and often has prunes added, but people sometimes fudge and call any non-descript mix of meat and cabbage bigus, so that's what I'm calling it for now.

I love this stuff. Pretty damn easy to prepare. I'm a foreigner, so I use spices that the Russians wouldn't. That's because they are complete wusses when it comes to spice.

Anyway, my most recent batch used ground chicken, and somehow the broth just isn't quite there. That's because the ground chicken I buy is made exclusively from breast meat, which means almost no fat. Fat is flavor, which means that this meat is high in protein and low in taste. Today I realized that I could buy just plain old chicken fat if I wanted to, but that kind of defeats my purpose: I'm trying not to get too complicated. In the States I would just buy some chicken broth or chicken granules for the process. No store in Russia sells chicken broth, and I've never seen bouillon cubes or granules. Did an internet search on bouillon cubes, and to my surprise it seems they have the stuff in the country, though I've never seen it anywhere. The internet also told me that the Russians look at bouillon cubes as unhealthy, evil, satanic, and the root of all moral decay. Good to know.

So at the market yesterday I found a place that looked like they should have bouillon cubes. Didn't find them. Then I did the unthinkable: I asked the proprietress whether she had them. To my shock, she answered in the affirmative, and that they cost 4 rubles. "Apiece?" quoth I. "Verily," she did respond. Huh. Whodathunkit? They sell buoillon cubes here individually, not in packs of ten.

So next time I make this dish with chicken I will add a bouillon cube and see how it turns out. If you want to see my most recent recipe, look on my cooking blog.