As Christmas is around the corner, the air is filled with nostalgia and the aroma of enticing baked goods. The four weeks preceding this holiday make perfect sense as they prepare our minds and soul for the festivity. Personally, my favourite part has always been the previous three-four days when my grandma and I prepared sweet and savory cookies for the entire family. We always assembled a cookie box with different cookies made of the traditional 3:2:1 shortbread dough. However, the real star of the event was a savory dessert of a medialuna shape filled with sausage or cheese and covered with crispy grated cheese. Since then, whenever I am homesick, I open my notebook and look for granny’s medialuna recipe. The moment I start baking, I feel this is the dish that smells and tastes like home.
You probably start asking what a medialuna is and what an Argentinian dessert has to do with my family. Medialuna is a yeast-based sweet dough somewhere between the brioche and the croissant, making the perfect snack for the afternoon. I remember the year I spent in Buenos Aires. My flatmates and I went for a walk in San Telmo every Sunday to eat medialuna with jam. Despite the sweetness, the fluffiness of the dough reminded me of those sausage and cheese-filled bites of the same shape my grandma used to make.
As a child, I always stood in front of the oven and watched as it was a realtime timelapse how the medialunas rose. Eventually, the melted cheese oozed out and we all knew they were my creations. At that time, I didn’t have the skills to roll them up perfectly, or simply my cravings for cheese were so extensive I filled them with extra portions. I still overfill them despite my technical improvement. To distinguish which were stuffed with cheese and which ones with sausage, my granny sprinkled the former with white sesame seeds while the latter with cumin seeds. After 15 minutes, there was literally a fight over the last cumin ones. The addition of the cumin seeds, which pair perfectly with the sausage’s spices, lent the snack a deeper flavour. That’s the reason why everybody was obsessing about this savory dessert.
So here is a new appetizer recipe to try this year, and I guarantee you that your family and friends will also jump to the table as soon as you serve it. And if you are still not convinced about the extra kick that the sausage adds to the dish, try out new flavour combinations and fill the triangles with a different ingredient. As my grandma put hers, put your own signature stamp on the recipe.
Granny’s sausage and cheese medialuna
Ingredients
- 500 g flour
- 250 g butter
- 1 tbsp salt
- 3 g instant yeast
- 0,5 dl milk
- 1 tbsp sugar
- 2 eggs one for the dough and one for brushing the medialunas
- 150 g créme fraiche
- 100 g cheese 50 g grated, the other 50 g cut into 2 cm bites
- 50 g sausage cut into 2 cm bites
- 2 tbsp seeds (white sesame, cumin) optional for decoration
Instructions
- We start with activating the yeast. This process has three essential characteristics: neither plant-based milk nor natural sweeteners/alternatives to sugar would work. I threw several grams of dried yeast into the garbage until I realized that this recipe would not work with alternative products. You always need a little bit of sugar and flour as they are crucial to activating the yeast's microorganisms. The yeast won't activate in cold liquid, while too-hot milk kills its natural fungi. So, heat 0,5 dl milk with a teaspoon of sugar and flour until it feels lukewarm (35-40°C). Put the yeast in a measuring cup and pour the milk on it; then let it sit for 10 mins. You will see that tiny bubbles appear on the surface and the final result is a thick brownish milk. If nothing has happened to the milk so far, don't worry; the milk's temperature might have been the problem. I always keep extra dried yeast at home to repeat the process.
- In a bowl, sift the flour, then add a pinch of salt and butter. I always knead the dough by hand, but you can always use a stand mixer. Knead it until the butter has incorporated smoothly into the flour and has a nice powdery yet greasy texture.
- Make a tiny hole in the middle, and pour the yeast mixture, one egg and half of the créme fraiche into it. Start to knead the dough. If the dough needs more liquid, add the remaining créme fraiche and keep kneading until entirely homogeneous. The dough has to be firm (not elastic).
- Grease a bowl with a little bit of oil/butter, place the dough in it, cover it with a napkin, and let it ferment for half an hour in a warm place.
- In the meantime, you can grate half of the cheese and cut the other half and the sausage into small pieces. They will be the filling of our medialunas. (You can be creative and use any filling you like.)
- Place the dough on a lightly floured surface and roll it to 0,5 cm thick. Cut triangle shapes of about 7 cm. Place a cheese or sausage bite on the shortest edge of each triangle and roll them up like a croissant/medialuna.
- Place baking paper on a tray, brush the medialuna with egg and sprinkle with grated cheese. To distinguish the cheese medialuna from the sausage ones, my granny always sprinkled the cheese stuffed with white sesame seeds, while the sausage medialuna with cumin seeds. Place them over the tray.
- Preheat oven to 180°C. While the oven heats up, let the medialunas ferment a little bit more.
- Bake them for about 15-20 mins/until golden brown. I recommend trying the first one to ensure the inside is perfectly baked.
- If there remains some for the night, keep them in a cookie box so they stay soft.
- Enjoy!
