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Bierock rise again

By TOM ISERN

© Plains Folk

Earlier this winter I heard from a professional chef in Bellevue, Wash., requesting a consultation on the subject of bierocks. All right, this wasn't just out of the blue — the chef happens to be my niece, Jennifer Harris, who does business as a personal chef under the name "Home Plates" (www.homeplateschef.com).

Harris was supposed to cook for the monthly meeting of her local professional society and, recalling her roots in western Kansas, wanted to prepare bierocks for her colleagues. We chatted a while about dough, she went ahead with preparations, and the professional judgment of her peers was enthusiastic.

This set me wondering whether bierocks might have become chic, winning favor beyond their ethnic Volga-German base and outside their hearth region of the central plains. To an extent this is so. Recipe indexes all over the World Wide Web make reference to bierocks or to runzas, as they often are known in Nebraska. It's gratifying to note, though, that the first reference on bierocks served up by the web's most popular search engine is to my recipe in Plains Folk web site (www.plainsfolk.com/recipe/bierock.htm).

Broader popularity comes at a cost. Most of the recipes call for frozen bread dough, instead of giving directions for the traditional, slightly sweet yeast dough. This is too bad. Likewise, the movement of runzas into popular culture via an Omaha-based drive-in chain has not upheld culinary quality. The mass-produced product misses the mark as to both dough and filling.

For the benefit of the uninitiated, let me explain what I'm talking about. A bierock is a piece of dough wrapped around a filling (commonly ground beef, onions, and cabbage) and baked into a portable meal. Bierocks are associated with the Volga-Germans of the central plains.

As a folk food bierocks moved from family tradition into school lunch menus within the region and became staples of church fund-raisers. I learned to make bierocks, for instance, from the women of Lutheran Women's Missionary League, St. John's Church, Ellinwood.

The Hutchinson News recently featured the burgeoning business of Jim Konda, Dodge City — the Gemini Bierockhaus. Konda has been producing bierocks commercially for three years and currently markets as many as 90 dozen a week. The same article mentions another supplier, Becky's Bierocks, of St. Francis.

It sounds like Konda is keeping up quality. He describes the production process as "time-consuming" and remarks, "That's why a lot of people like them but don't want to go to the trouble of making them."

Which I don't understand, because making bierocks is kind of fun. Personally, I like ground pork as the meat base. I chop the onions and cabbage by hand and season the mix with herbs (cracked pepper, a Bavarian mix, garlic salt) and a few shakes of soy or Worcestershire. The only trick to rolling them up is not to get the dough edges bunched up too thick. If you do, they won't get done through.

Bierocks freeze well and microwave nicely, which contributes to their current popularity. It's possible in a few years they will cross over into mainstream culinary culture, and when they do, let's be sure to give credit to the immigrant cooks who brought them to us.

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