Recipe: Hungarian plum dumplings (Szilvásgombóc)

A colleague brought me two days ago a box of plums. Her parents have a house with garden and six plum trees. Now is the season for the plums so she baked plum cakes for us and brought us fresh plums as well.

I love plum dumplings so, even though I’m being careful now with what I eat, I thought it’s ok if I have two pieces for lunch. After coming home from the gym this morning where my trainer almost killed me at step aerobic and Bums-Tums-Legs, I decided to not waste any more time and start cookin’!

Preparation and cooking time all together took about two hours but it was worth it. I cooked only 4 dumplings/person and put the remaining ready-made-not-yet-cooked dumplings and the rest of the plums in the freezer for the next time. I’m proud to report that I managed to stay strong and eat only 3 dumplings, even though they are soooo delicious! I’m sharing the recipe with you so you can see for yourself.

Ingredients

• 1 kg potatoes, boiled, peeled and mashed
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1 large egg
• approx. 250 g flour
• 20 small or 10 big plums
• cinnamon
• 100 g sugar
• 200 g breadcrumbs
• 20 g butter

Instructions

1. Mix the mashed potatoes with salt and eggs.
2. Add flour gradually until a dough is formed and it’s not sticky.
3. Spread the dough onto a floured surface and cut 5 cm x 5 cm squares.
4. Place the pitted plum (half plum if big) in the center of each square and sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar.
5. Seal the dough over the plum and form balls by hand.
6. When the water is boiling, carefully add the dumplings into the water, making sure that they don’t touch each other.
7. Cook the dumplings over medium heat until they swim out to the surface. They might stick to the bottom of the pot so check regularly that they’re not.
8. In the meantime, melt the butter and brown the breadcrumbs. Add sugar when the breadcrumbs cooled off.
9. When the dumplings are cooked, place them in the breadcrumbs and coat it well.
10. Serve warm.

Makes 18-20 plum dumplings.

Nutritional facts: 1 plum dumpling contains 175 calories, 1.6g fat, 34.4g carbs and 4.36g protein.

If you like Hungarian dishes (and who doesn’t?), I highly recommend “Gundel’s Hungarian Cookbook” where you can find recipes to all the famous Hungarian dishes. Gundel is an excellent Hungarian restaurant in Budapest run by a highly renown chef with the same name and his recipes are phenomenal.