Ryazhenka: A Post-Soviet Fermented Drink Made from Baked Milk
In the chiller of a Chișinău supermarket stands a white bottle that speaks two languages - and says something different in each. In Romanian it announces lapte covăsit, soured milk. Beneath it, in Cyrillic: РЯЖЕНКА. It isn't a translation - Romanian never had a word of its own for this drink, so it borrowed the most generic one it could find. Ryazhenka (Russian: ряженка, Ukrainian: ряжанка) is a fermented milk drink made from milk that is baked for several hours before it's cultured - an East Slavic invention that the Soviet dairy industry brought into Moldovan cuisine.
What Ryazhenka Means and Who Claims It
Etymologists still haven't agreed on where the name comes from; the most common explanation runs through the Ukrainian pryazhyty, to bake in an oven - after all, the whole drink is made from baked, pryazhene milk. Russian, though, offers one more meaning: colloquially, a ряженка is a mummer, a woman in fancy dress. For a drink that's sold in Moldova under someone else's name, you'd be hard pressed to find a more fitting double meaning. Even the borrowed covăsit is Slavic, for that matter - it shares its root with kvass. And to complete the confusion: in Romanian cuisine, lapte covăsit means ordinary soured milk, the kind people left to sour at home with a little cream or a crust of bread - the traditional recipe involves no baking at all.
Ryazhenka's home is the East Slavic triangle - Ukraine, Russia and Belarus - where people knew it long before Soviet dairies learned to bottle it and shipped it across the whole Union, from the Baltics to Kazakhstan; nobody along the way came up with a name of their own for it, and Lithuanian and Estonian dairies still sell it simply as riaženka. The oldest written record dates from 1855 in Kyiv, and a number of Russian sources credit it to Ukrainian cuisine too. That isn't proof of where it was born, but it is a clue. Its relatives fill a whole shelf: Russian varenets is made from milk boiled down by a third, Turkic katyk from milk heated over a fire; ayran goes in completely the opposite direction, thinning soured milk with water and salt.
The Milk Is Baked First, Fermented Later
Originally the oven did the work: a pot of milk was slid into the dying embers and left there until the milk thickened and took on color; in Ukraine it was then soured with a spoonful of sour cream. Industry simply put numbers on the ritual - the milk is held between 85 and 99 degrees Celsius for at least three hours, and only then do the cultures go in, the same ones that make yogurt. That's the whole trick: ryazhenka differs from yogurt not in its bacteria, but in the milk they're given to work on. The long baking gives it a creamy color and a faintly sweet note that advertisers like to talk up as caramel; in reality it tastes more like milk left to simmer on the stove for a long time, down to a hint of the skin that forms on top.
You drink it chilled and on its own: it's thicker than kefir and noticeably milder, hinting at sourness rather than insisting on it. Cooks also pour it into the batter for blini and syrniki. In the shop, just watch out for one word: lapte acru is ordinary soured milk, not ryazhenka.
A Bottle to Go with Sochniki
My bottle - a four-percent Milk Mark from the creamery in Florești, in the north of the country - came from the Nr.1 supermarket in Chișinău. I drank it on the go, washing down sochniki from the same shopping trip. There was no caramel revelation: it tasted like a very mild drinking yogurt, smooth and only faintly tangy. The bottle cost 14.60 MDL (0.70 EUR). The mummer didn't give herself away by the taste, either.
