Kayette with beet leaf

1. Stage

Cut off the leaves from the leafy beets, possibly with a small stem part. Soak for a few minutes in plenty of water and rinse several times from the soil and grains of sand. Shake off the excess water, put 3-4 leaves on a cutting board on each other and cut into small strips/rectangles.

2. Stage

Chop a large onion and add it to the beet leaves. If you don't have such beets, just blanch white cabbage leaves for a couple of minutes, or take raw green cabbage leaves. It's much softer than white cabbage, so you don't need to blanch it. Slice or coarsely chop them.

3. Stage

Grind the meat with a meat grinder. Add to the vegetables. Salt and pepper to taste. The meat should be half as much as the beet leaves. If you have spinach instead of leafy beets, chop it randomly. If the spinach is frozen, thaw and squeeze the excess liquid out with your hands. Frozen spinach must be whole, in no case shredded, otherwise after mixing with the stuffing you will get a green mess.

4. Stage

We soak the crepe, then wring it out with our hands.

5. Stage

If anyone doesn't know what it is, it looks like this. If I'm not mistaken, it's a film covering the abdominal organs of animals. Well, if I'm wrong, then sorry for the false explanation :-)

6. Stage

Drop a small portion of the crepe from the bowl onto a cutting board.

7. Stage

Thoroughly mix the minced meat with herbs, salt and pepper. This is what should turn out. You can see that there are much more beet leaves than meat. If you are a meat eater, take equal amounts of meat and greens. I weighed after mixing all the ingredients - the weight is 2150 grams.

8. Stage

Take a large handful of minced meat, gently squeeze in your fist.

9. Stage

And we put it on a cutting board on the pre-flattened part of the crepe.

10. Stage

Let's start wrapping. First on the left...

11. Stage

Then from the middle...

12. Stage

Then on the right... For some reason I got a snake face. But it doesn't matter, now we'll round it off.

13. Stage

Now cut off the excess crepe.

14. Stage

Take the wrapped circle in your hands and, slightly squeezing on both sides, give it a round shape. It is about the size of a tennis ball.

15. Stage

We put it in a baking dish.

16. Stage

Also form balls of the rest of the stuffing and place them tightly (!) in the form, press them together. When baked, they will shrink in size and spread out a little in different directions. I have a large mold and a small one - 12 large kayettes.

17. Stage

Pour white wine on the bottom of the mold, about 1 cm.

18. Stage

And put it in the oven to bake at 180 degrees. After 40-50 minutes, take out the mold(s) and see how browned the top is, and how much baking juice has come out.

19. Stage

Using two forks, gently flip the kayet from top to bottom so that the roasted side sinks into the liquid and the bottom is at the top. Here you can see me grabbing them from the bottom to carefully flip them over.

20. Stage

Here is the bottom, not yet browned side. And again we put in the oven for 5-10 minutes to brown.

21. Stage

After 10 minutes, everything is ruddy.

22. Stage

At this point, you can stop and place the cayet on a serving plate. Then carefully drain the hot juice from the mold into a small container to pour over the cayet on the plate. If the fat has melted out of the balls during baking, remove it with a spoon from the overflowed juice and discard it, so that only the fat-free juice-sauce can be used.

23. Stage

But I like the balls to be ruddy on all sides, so after draining the meat juice, I turn them twice more with the white sides up and brown them for 5 minutes on each side. In the photo you can see that they are all light brown.

24. Stage

Here's a close-up view.

25. Stage

All done. You can serve immediately with mashed potatoes or simply with boiled potatoes, sprinkling the food in the plate with nonfat juice from the cajeta.

26. Stage

BON APPETIT!

27. Stage

And here is the cut kayet.

28. Stage

Here's another cut. By the way, you can see that there is about the same amount of meat as the vegetables. That's because the beet has boiled away in the cooking process. That's why it should be added to the raw mince in larger quantities than the meat.

29. Stage

And here's a very, very close up.

30. Stage

From the photo it may look like the cayetas are burnt, but they are not - just the dark greens of the leafy beets when baked under the crepee look a little blackish. In reality, there is nothing burnt :-)