Traditional Sweet Cheese Blintzes

The classic, old-country version of sweet cheese blintzes uses farmer's cheese and sour cream for the filling. Traditionally eaten on the holiday of Shavuot, which features dairy foods, these blintzes are wonderful with fresh berries or jam.

Stuffed with the famer's cheese, a humble, crumbly cheese of the people, fried in butter, blintzes are rightly stars of the Shavuot table, when it's traditional to eat dairy foods. Also known as, to those of us who would mostly rather be vegetarians, the best holiday meal of the year. Full disclosure: at our house, blintzes are a year-around food group. However, break out the farmer's cheese and it becomes a party. Read on for more on farmer's cheese.

Key ingredient: farmer's cheese

Farmer's cheese is a simple, plain, crumbly cheese, with a texture between goat cheese and feta but a flavor more like cottage cheese. It can usually be found lurking in one of the refrigerators at chain supermarkets (usually Friendship brand), and always at kosher or Eastern European markets, like Russian or Polish. It tends to be on the pricier side, maybe because it's a quasi-specialty item. It's also absolutely easy (and cheaper) to make yourself from regular supermarket milk. I have a walk-through post about making farmer's cheese here.

There is usually another kind of creamy white cheese added to the filling; cream cheese seems to be popular and you could use softened cream cheese here, but I went with sour cream because there was no cream cheese back in the shtetl, you know?

Making batter for blintzes

Because they're folksy and not even a smidge haute, unlike their snooty cousins the crêpes, blintzes don't need to rest in the fridge, be perfectly smooth, or any other hand-holding. Just blitz the batter away in a food processor, or whisk it by hand (a few lumps never killed anybody). Then throw it around a hot pan. You don't need a special pan, any large nonstick skillet will do.

For these special Shavuot blintzes, we'll be making an eggier, milkier, generally more luxurious and thinner blintz. (For most of my blintzes, I use my base recipe, found here in my post about Israeli-style sweet cheese blintzes, which are similar to these but with their own charm.)

Cooking blintzes

To cook blintzes, you need a lightweight pan, so a cast iron wouldn't work here. In order to swirl the batter around the pan to form the blintz, you need to be able to pick up the pan quickly with one hand. I like to use a large nonstick skillet, ungreased. Adding oil or butter doesn't allow the blintz to stick at the rims and cook in a thin enough layer.

To form the blintz, you pour about ¼ cup of batter onto the center of the hot pan, about medium heat, and swirl it around. The edges will be thinner than the rest of the blintz and cook almost immediately. The flicking of the pan maneuver is easier to do than to explain; you can see a short video of me making a blintz here. For filled blintzes like the ones we're making here, you want to cook them until the bottom is browned and the top is set (just barely tacky to the touch). Use a flexible turner to gently peel the blintz off the pan—it should oblige you after a good nudge—and pile them up, cooked side up, on a plate, where they'll await filling.

Filling cheese blintzes

Once you've got all the blintzes made and cooled enough to work with, dollop 2-3 tablespoons of sweet cheese filling just below the midline of the blintz. Fold the top up, then the sides in. Finally, roll, tucking firmly. The outside should be just tacky enough to adhere easily to itself.

If you've been following my robust program of blintz research, you may recall that for filled blintzes, I preferred to cook them on one side (no flipping) and then place the filling on the uncooked side (i.e., the side of the blintz that was not in contact with the pan). Well, further data sets yielded the conclusion that I also like the other way: filling the cooked side (the side that was in contact with the hot pan), then frying the uncooked side. I especially like that method when making traditional sweet cheese blintzes, because they get extra crispy. So that's what we'll be doing here.

Frying blintzes

The denouement of a traditional blintz is to get fried up in plenty of butter (or oil, but obviously, since we're in dairy territory, butter is better). Use the same skillet you used to cook the blintz wrappers, heat it up over a medium flame, and place your little packets of Ashkenazi delight in the pan for a final waltz. Just a minute or so on each side will make them crispy and warm the filling through.