UKRAINE, KHARKIV, Apr 14 — On April 12, a master class was held in Kharkiv, where participants could bake sweet Easter bread (paskas, or paska in singular — ed.) using flour milled with wheat harvested from the demined fields of the Kherson and Mykolaiv regions. Gwara Media attended the event and brought you photos and stories from there.
Ukraine is currently the most mined country, with potentially 23 percent of its land at risk of contamination with landmines and unexploded ordnance. According to the State Emergency Service of Ukraine, the Kharkiv, Kherson, and Donetsk regions are the most contaminated by mines. In total, about 156 thousand territories are considered dangerous because of mines and other explosive devices.
For this master class, the farmer Oleksii Rudenko with his nephews harvested wheat in Mala Oleksandrivka and other villages in the Kherson region that have been liberated from Russian occupation. Mykolaiv-based manufacturing “Golden way” (in Ukrainian — “Золотий шлях”) grind flour from this wheat. To make growing this wheat possible, sappers cleaned 1,800 hectares of land.
The “Soul of Soil 2.0” project, organizers of the master class, also used the productions of farmers from Kharkiv regions. Currently, around 40% of this region’s territory is polluted by explosive objects, of which more than 574 thousand hectares are agricultural.
“Our farm area is 2,100 hectares, but near 10% of this area is still considered as potentially mined,” said Serhii Likhno, the head of “Khlibproduct” LLC.
Dozens of Kharkiv residents joined the master class. They learned not just secrets of cooking paska from chef Oleksandr Tsepkovskyi, but also listened to tales of sappers’ work and rules of mine safety from the head of the humanitarian demining group, Ihor Ovcharuk.
Oleksandr Tsepkovskyi had the group cooking an Easter bread using the flour brewing technique.
“Firstly, you need to make a pre-ferment, mixing yeast with milk and sugar, to “activate” (the yeast — ed.). Then, boil a mix of flour and milk, mix these two substances. Then, just add eggs into it. I add eggs and their yolks, which makes paskas taste richer,” Tsepkovskyi explained.
“This event was really important. I always tell my children not to touch strange objects on the street, to tell adults about it, to be careful, and today we heard it too,” said Kateryna Popova, one of the parents at the event. For her family, Easter is a special holiday, so paskas are always on her table.
“This year, my husband joined the army, so my daughters, Sasha and Diana, and I are very much waiting for him on Easter — it is the first time we haven’t seen each other in so long. We’ll definitely prepare the table: we will cook shashlyk (a dish of skewered and grilled pieces of meat — ed.) and bake Easter bread. I will try to use a stable glazing recipe, which I heard about today,” said Kateryna.
According to organizers, in parallel with Kharkiv, the master class was held in four Ukrainian cities: Lviv, Dnipro, and Mykolaiv. Earlier, on April 9, the first initiative, “Soul of Soil 2.0,” where Yevhen Klopotenko was a chef, was held in Kyiv. The organizers of the event were the Ministry of Economy, the United Nations Development Programme, and the supermarket chain “Silpo.”
“We understand the value of the Ukrainian wheat harvest, which was grown despite the war. With the help of Easter bread master classes, we want to tell our guests about the real value of the bread, made with flour from demined fields — not in texts and numbers, but through hands-on experience (of cooking with it — ed.),” said Kateryna Ohuriaiva, the head of marketing at “Silpo.”
The organizers told Gwara journalists that on April 14, blogger Tetiana Nikolenko will hold the same master class in Ukrainian food restaurant “Veselka” in New York. Vinnytsia-based “Vinnytsia bread product plant №2” made flour for this master class, buying wheat from territories close to the frontline, including the Kharkiv region.
In the end, the organizers also explained that the “Soul of Soil 2.0” project includes not only baking Easter bread but also creating Easter baskets. The basket contains pysankas (decorated boiled eggs) from Galicia, which were painted by the mother of paramedic Iryna Tsybukh, who was killed in the Kharkiv region during troops rotation, and rushnyks (decorative and ritual cloth, usually embroidered), which were made by women from the villages in Sumy region that are close to the Russian border.
Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex in the UK, received an Easter basket with an Easter bread made with flour from demined fields during his visit to the Superhumans Center in Lviv. He spent the day with soldiers, veterans, and children, talking about their experiences of recovery. Prince Harry was interested in the demining program because his mother, Princess Diana, drew attention to this problem by going through a live minefields in Huambo, Angola during a brief break in the country’s civil war in 1997.
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