Gaby
Unlike other thin pancakes, the Chernihiv version is cooked on the skillet and finished in the oven. There isn’t a gram of flour in them—the batter for Chernihiv nalysnyky is made from milk and sifted starch. The cheese filling is unusual too: like the batter, it contains a lot of eggs.
Ingredients for the batter: 10 eggs, 500 g of starch, 1 liter of milk, 5 tablespoons of sugar, 1 teaspoon of salt, 5 tablespoons of oil, and 200 g of butter for baking.
Ingredients for the filling: 1 kg of cheese, 3 egg yolks, and 5 tablespoons of sugar.
Sift the starch through a sieve. Beat the eggs with the sugar until frothy, then add the milk and oil. Mix the ingredients thoroughly. Combine the milk-and-egg mixture with the starch and mix again until smooth.
Pour the batter in portions onto a hot skillet, spreading it to cover the bottom completely. Call this the frying stage, since you will bake the pancakes in the oven later (traditionally, this dish was prepared in village ovens).
For the filling, mash the cheese with the sugar and egg yolks. Place the filling onto the pancakes, roll them up into tubes, tuck the edges inside, and arrange the rolls in a heatproof baking dish.
Pour the melted butter over the pancakes and bake for 20 minutes at 180°C (356°F).
Serve the finished dish with sour cream.
Tip
Preheat the skillet with salt to prevent the pancakes from sticking during cooking.
