Bacon Biscuit (Škvarkovník)
Ingredients: 1lb flour, yeast, ground-up bacon bits
Prep Time: 30 minutes to an hour for the dough to rise, some 20 minutes to prepare the biscuits, another 20 minutes for dough rising and finally 20 minutes for baking.
In Slovakia, we make this amazing bacon-flavored biscuit (pagáč) called škvarkovník. The name is derived for the word for bacon bits, škvarky. When done properly, the biscuits are extremely fluffy and the dough comes apart in layers. I actually like to eat them like that, layer-by-layer.
To make these biscuits, you will need ground up bacon bits. These are quite easy to find in Slovakia. They come in a margarine-sized tub, as shown in the photos below. However, I don’t know if anything like this available in the States. You can probably start off by buying bacon bits and grinding them up yourself.
As with any leavened dough, start off by preparing the yeast culture, kvások. This is done by dissolving the packet of yeast in luke-warm milk and adding about a teaspoon of sugar. Once it bubbles up (as in the recipe for knedla), add it to your flour (múka). Then add about two table spoons worth of bacon bits (škvarky) cooked with butter (masľo). Add a dash of salt and enough water (voda) to end up with dough having the consistency shown on the right.
Next let the dough rise. This will take somewhere between 30 minutes to an hour, depending on the temperature of your room. My grandma fills a pot with hot water, and places the dough on top of it to speed up the process. Roll the dough out to a pancake approximately the width of your finger. Use a pastry brush (one made out of goose feathers works great!) to spread on a layer of bacon bits dissolved with butter.
Fold the outer end over one third of the way. Spread the bacon sauce onto this side and fold the bottom third over.
You now have a dough rectangle containing two layers of the bacon sauce. Spread on another layer on top and then roll the dough into a cylinder.
Take this cylinder and hand pat it down into a circular shape. Then take a rolling pin and roll the dough out to about an inch thick. Don’t forget to work on a surface dusted with flour and to dust the top of the dough to keep the pin from sticking. Take a drinking glass and also stick it in flour. Use a circular motion to cut out the biscuits. This is identical to making pierogi.
Place the biscuits onto a greased baking pan. Let rise for about 20 minutes. In the mean time, preheat your oven. My grandma likes to bake them on the bottom and they took only about 20 minutes in her wood burning stove. Serve pagáče as a snack or instead of bread with soups.
I would like to find out how easy is it to buy ground-up bacon bits in the States. Are these available, and if, in which grocery stores and in what aisle? Thanks!
For bacon “škvarky” try this website, if you don’t see it, email them as they carry alot of stuff that’s not advertised on their site or can get it for you, good prices on their items and reasonable shipping!
http://www.slovczechvar.com/
Click on my name to get there!!
what is the name of the store? can you share? thanks
It’s Slovak-Czech Varieties at slovczechvar.com. I have purchased bryndza from them in the past. Steve’s original post got put in the spam box, hence that’s why it wasn’t visible before.
Lubos – you could come over to my house – my oldest son put a pound of bacon in the oven last week and forgot about it. I have a nice zip lock with bacon bits in my freezer……:>)
Lubos, They sell bacon bits in the store (they are horribly awful and have a imitation bacon taste). Your suggestion was correct, for best taste probably cook your own bacon and crumble it yourself.
Sasa – yeah, I know about the artificial “bacon bits” sold in the States. The bacon bits that are sold in Slovakia and what we used in making of this recipe are ground up into a paste. You can see them in that tub at the back of some of the photos. What I had in mind was whether it’s possible to buy this bacon “paste”. But thanks anyway!
Hormel makes “Real Bacon” bits that are sold in a small plastic pouch (usually near the salad dressings and artificial bacon bits in some US supermarkets- I find them at Stop and Shop). They are real bacon, and aren’t bad, but would probably take some extra grinding for this recipe as they are shredded bits rather than a paste.
This recipe sounds delicious! I have been lurking here for a while and enjoying your site very much.
about them “bacon bits” sold in the US.
Let me say just this, “bacon bits” sold in the US are not “škvarky” as we know it in Slovakia.
Bacon bits in the US are pretty much fried bacon, drained of fat, kind of like you do for breakfast, and then shreded to “bits” you can use on salads or for other seasonings.
“škvarky” is a fresh bacon, cut into small pieces and fried in its own fat, and then put into jar, fat and everything, for later use. A totally different thing and totally different taste. I have yet to find “škvarky” in the US, and I have a lot of “fancy stores” around, carrying a lot of ethnic food, some really good and authentic, not so much for “škvarky”
Sounds to me like a golden opportunity to open Miro’s Skvarky store…
Lubos said:
Sounds to me like a golden opportunity to open Miro’s Skvarky store…
—
frankly, if I was no so lazy, I(or anybody else) should do it, be it a store or restaurant. There is so much good stuff in Slovak/Czech cooking, and yet in the DC area there is no ethnic store catering to Slovak/Czech community. Anybody for a challenge? Maybe a group of folks?
BTW, I hope this is not a spam, but I like to check some stuff before I post, as my memory is good but I may skip some details.
Here is a recipe for skvarky from Czech cooking site
http://www.ok-recepty.cz/view.php?cisloclanku=2008020063
I never made skvarky here, butI think it would work with cubing the smoked pork jowl(it’s almost like oravska slanina, doesn’t even have sweet taste to it, like most kinds of bacon here), frying it and them grinding(I think food processor would do good enough job)
Thanks. That’s sound like a good “american” substitute
http://www.cumberlandgapprovision.com/pages/products.html
link for smoked pork jowl, on the picture with products it is in the middle on the top. On this website there are states with stores that carry their products. I use smoked jowl also for bryndzove halusky.
Lubos, I can’t tell you how much I enjoy your cooking site. My Mother side of the family is Slovak & I grew up eating her delicious food. I recognize a lot of dishes you have here. Glad to have found you here.
Hello all, it is actually very simple even for untalented in cooking to make your own “skvarky”. I did it several times and they were good, better then I expected when I did it for the first time. Most importantly, they were real and fresh! I found that in the Raley’s grocery store at Lake Tahoe they sell plain raw pork fat. Not sure where the Raley’s store chain has their stores, I know in some parts of California and Nevada they do. You can check it out here http://www.raleys.com. BTW, they also sell celery root (zeler, alebo celer?), kholrabi (karelab) and Savoy cabbage (kel) and fresh yeasts (cerstve kvasnice). That was nice surprise for me. But back to skvarky. I usually do 2lbs of pork fat at a time. Just cut the pork fat in cubes, add little bit of water in the very beginning to a larger pot, not even enough to cover entire bottom of the pot and put all skvarky to the pot. Now, this is important, if you have a gas stove, it is very useful if you put that heavy disk made of cast iron on the gas burner so the heat spreads evenly to the entire bottom surface of a pot. Instead of that cast iron disk you can probably use a disk made of steel mesh that supose to have same effect. Quite frankly I never seen either one here in the US, I made my own from old frying pan. Now, just start simmering the fat cubes slowly, stiring almost constantly until the cubes start releasing fat. Once there is already a liquid fat in the pot, you can stir it just once in a while. But, make sure the heat is very low all the time, during the entire process, which takes couple of hours, until cubes turns to light brown or golden color. You do not want it to fry. It is slow cooking or better to say just melting the fat out of the cubes. At the end you may want to separate liquid lard from skvarky. You will want to add salt on skvarky, but I’m not expert, so I do not know whether it is better to salt them right after they are separated from lard or later, right before eating. Please do not assume this to be an expert recipie, it is just how I do it and it works well.
Rado, thank you very much for your very detailed instructions for making skvarky! I will definitely give it a shot, but finding the pork fat may be little tricky. I used to live in California, little south of you, in Lancaster, and one good thing about the large Hispanic population was that it was quite easy to find a good butcher. The Vallarta grocery chain has an amazing meat section, with halves of cows hanging from hooks, something you don’t ever see anymore. I haven’t yet found a similar shop carrying “leftover” meat products now that I am on the east coast. But I’ll keep looking. I definitely want to try making these biscuits myself from scratch, the photos here are of me helping my grandma.
PS: If you take photos next time you make them, I’ll be more than happy to post them to the website.
@Rado: What you are describing sounds like rendering lard to me. Is skvarky a mixture of lard and the leftover fat? According to Miro, skvarky is cooked bacon in its own fat. However, pork fat is not bacon because pure pork fat by definition does not have any meat in it. So, my question is, can skvarky be made with just pure pork fat?
@lubos: If you get a whole or half hog from a local farm near you (share it with your friends), you can usually get the pork fat. I’ve ordered a half hog and I’m getting the leaf fat which I plan to render lard from! To find a farm near you, check out: http://www.eatwild.com.
Thanks for your tip, Grace. I have always been little skeptical of these deals though. Basically, I don’t eat all that much meat, and I think that if I end up with a half or a quarter pig or cow in the freezer, I would feel forced to eat pork chops or steaks every day. I heard that Eastern Market here in Washington, D.C. has very decent butchers where you can get stuff like pork fat. I’ll go investigate one of these days.
My son lived close to Eastern Market in DC and so I was there a bunch of times. They indeed have good butchers, though I was not looking for a pork fat (I am sure you can get it) They cut and slice you a meat the way you want it and willing to accommodate you any way you wish. Good fish and vegie market as well, though I preferred “Fish Market” for fish in South DC on a Potomac River. They have really good stuff, daily caught and delivered.
Yes, I have seen it in Mexican stores in California- chicharon is what they call it. They are rather big pieces – to je uz skor skvarisko ako skvarka:) But it tastes great – it would definitely be perfect for this recipe.
Thanks for the tip, Eva. Would this be in Vallarta? I used to live in Lancaster, CA for 3 years and we had one or two of those stores. I was always amazed by their butcher section, where you would find quarter cows hanging from meat hooks. It’s definitely something you don’t see anymore.
Grace, to make skvarky, you need just pure raw pork fat not bacon. However, it can contain a thin layer of meat which will create a crispy part making skvarky more “interesting” in your mouth. But make sure there is minimum meat, really just thin preferably one layer of meat. The ordinary bacon contain too much meat.
I should have probably mentioned that the cast iron disk to spread heat evenly is mostly important in the beginning until ALL pieces of fat turn from white to transparent like color. In this phase they tend to stick to the bottom of a pot too. At the end, it is up to you if you want to leave skvarky in its own lard or to separate them.
Unfortunatelly, it looks like I won’t be able to make my skvarky and post a pictures. I moved to southern Nevada and have not seen any raw fat anywhere yet.
I noticed Mexicans do have their own skvarky, you can find them in some stores as a snacks, they are called cracklings. I do not like them much, they are deep fried. They also have skin attached. I am not sure if skvarky are better with attached skin or without, I used to make them without skin.
I too miss my grammas skvarky i remember the jar full in the fridge. and she would make the best cookies with bacon. i suppose they were the bisquits but to me, what i remember they were more like a heavier cookie. she did
cut them with a glass as shown. oh how i miss
all the slovak recipes. i have a slovak cookbook but alot of them are not in there.
Which Slovak cookbook do you have? I have found only a hand full of Slovak or Czech cookbooks in the United States and none of them is very good. They either have way too many recipes to be useful, or the recipes are the americanized versions of Slovak dishes.