Mint Potica

Mint is a versatile herb that has been cultivated for cooking and medicine throughout history.

Pliny recorded that the Greeks and Romans added mint to perfumes, used it for baths and seasoned sauces and wines with it. Roman scholars were advised to wear a crown of mint to help them concentrate as mint was thought to promote clear thinking. Mint tea has also been used to aid digestion and even to battle the common cold.

When I was growing up we always had plenty of mint in our garden. Most of it my grandma dried and used as tea, but some inevitably ended up in my grandma’s mint potica. Since we never grew tarragon in my childhood, mint potica was more common in our household than tarragon potica. The filling can be prepared with fresh farmer’s cheese as in the tarragon potica recipe (where you replace tarragon with mint) or with a buttery filling as in this recipe.

To learn more about potica, read Is it pizza? No, it’s potica!.

MINT! FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD TO MODERN MANCHESTER

Recipe

Dough

• 400 g flour

• 7 g instant yeast

• 80 g butter

• 60 g sugar

• 2 egg yolks

• 170 ml warm milk

• 1 tbsp rum

• zest of 1 lemon

• 1 tsp vanilla paste (can be substituted with vanilla essence)

• a pinch of salt

• 1 egg for the egg wash

Mint Filling

• 100 g fresh mint

• 100 ml heavy whipping cream

• 100 g butter

• 60 g sugar

• 1 egg + 1 egg white

• 3 tbsp ground cookies

Instructions:

Dough

1. In a bowl, combine flour and yeast.

2. Heat the milk, sugar, and butter in a sauce pan until butter is melted.

3. Add lemon zest, rum and vanilla to the milk mixture and stir well.

4. Once the milk mixture is sufficiently cool, add the egg yolks and mix.

5. Add the milk mixture to the flour mixture and knead by hand or using a mixer until the dough is soft and elastic. It should not stick to your hands. Cover with plastic wrap and let rest in a warm place until the dough has doubled in size (about 60 minutes).

Filling

1. For the filling, beat the egg yolks, butter and sugar until light in color and fluffy.

2. Add heavy whipping cream and ground cookies.

3. Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks. Slowly fold the whipped egg whites into the buttery mixture.

4. Finely chop the mint.

Making potica

1. Heat the oven to 180 C (360 F). Traditionally, potica is baked in a ceramic pan called potičnica. If you have it, fill it up with water and place it into the oven until the water is boiling (this way potica does not dry up too much during baking). If you do not have it, you can use a bundt cake pan. Butter potičnica or a standard bundt cake pan well.

2. Dust the working area with flour. I usually roll out the dough on a tablecloth so it does not cool down too much during rolling.

3. Roll the dough into a rectangle 90 cm x 35 cm (depending on the size of your pan) about 0.5 cm thick. Spread the buttery filling in an even layer over the dough. Sprinkle chopped mint over it.

4. Roll up the dough by hand, stretching it slightly with each roll. Seal the ends securely by gently pulling dough down to cover ends.
5. Transfer the potica roll to the prepared pan so that the seam is looking upward (this way it will not be visible once potica is taken out of the pan).
6. Prick the potica with a toothpick to eliminate air pockets and let rise in a warm place for about 30 minutes.
7. Gently brush the potica with an egg wash.
8. Bake for an hour. After 30 minutes cover the potica with aluminum foil, so that the top will not brown too much.
9. Leave potica in the mold to cool down before taking it out.
10. Sprinkle with powdered sugar, slice and serve!