You may have noticed that there are not too many meaty dishes on this site. This is not because Slovaks don’t eat meat. On the contrary, meaty foods are actually quite popular. The reason is instead different. It is I who is not a big meat eater. And because of this, I don’t actually know much about cooking meat.

I figured it was time to change that. So I decided to learn how to make a really popular Slovak dish called sviečková na smotane, meaning tenderloin on cream. This is one dish you definitely must try on your travels to Slovakia. It is offered in just about every restaurant. Sviečková is also the single most complicated dish I have prepared to date. OK, perhaps complicated is not the right word. The most involved. Turns out, making this dish is actually pretty simple, but it requires quite a few steps.

In preparing this dinner, I followed a recipe from minibazar.sk, a strange combination of craigslist and a cooking site. But I love the recipes on minibazar. They are always completely authentic (submitted by regular people) and many have pictures – which I clearly find very useful in cooking. This particular recipe called for marinading the meat over the course of few days. Another recipe, one in the classic Czechoslovak Cookbook, tells instead to bake the meat while basting for some hour and a half in a 325F oven. Whatever you choose, this dish will not disappoint.

Instead of tenderloin (or sirloin), I used eye round, since that’s what my supermarket had already packed up in a large enough quantity. Eye round is somewhat dryer than tenderloin, but since I marinated it, I figured it won’t matter much. Having said that, let’s start cooking!

The left photo shows many, but not all, of the ingredients you’ll need. The beer is not an ingredient, but I like to have a glass of a cold one while cooking. You should use a parsley root (petržlen) but those are pretty much impossible to find in America. So I used a parsnip instead. I figured that although it is not the same vegetable, it at least looks very much alike. Peel and cut the root vegetables. Also cut the celery (zeler) but keep the onion (cibuľa) whole. Cook, along with black pepper (čierne korenie), caraway (rasca), bay leaf (bobkový list) and a slice of lemon (koliesko citrónu), in 2 cups of water. Cook for about 2 minutes after the water comes to boil.

While the vegetable “soup” is cooling down, take the cut of meat (mäso) and rinse it off. Dry it off with paper towels and then use a sharp knife to cut slits in it all around. Place about inch wide cuts of bacon (slanina) into the slots. Really shove them in there. Doing this reminded me of my friend Patricia’s visit to Slovakia in 2010. She is a vegetarian and commented that in Slovakia all vegetable dishes seem to have bacon in them. Turns out, in Slovakia even meat has bacon!

Place the meat in the vegetable mixture after it has cooled off completely. Add more water if needed so that at least half of the meat is underwater. Cover and place in the fridge at least overnight. Turn the meat periodically to get it marinated from both sides.

2 days later…

Take the marinated meat out and dry it off. This next step is pretty tricky so be careful. Heat up oil (olej) in a large pot (I used the same that had the vegetables in it, which I transferred to a different pot). Then lightly brown the meat on all sides. The tricky part is placing the meat in the oil and then flipping it. I used a large fork to pick it up and a knife to support it from the bottom. Chop up the onion (cibuľa) and fry in the oil until it starts turning yellow. Then add the rest of the vegetables and about a cup of the marinade water.

Also, start working on the knedľa.

Cover and let steam for about hour and a half. Add more water as needed. You are done when the meat feels soft. Take the meat out and slice it. It will have this beautiful dark purple color on the inside. This was the first time I have ever prepared such a large hunk of meat and I was really pleased with the outcome!

The next step involves liquefying the veggies. This would have been so much easier if had a hand-held mixer like the one shown in the original recipe. But since I didn’t, I used the traditional method – a metal strainer. This worked, but boy, next time I am getting a blender! Make sure to scrape off the mushed up veggies from the bottom.

Use heavy whipping cream (smotana) to make the sauce (omáčka). I used about equal amounts of water and cream, and kept adding until I got something of fairly creamy consistency. Add salt and little bit of lemon, to taste. Cook for a minute or two and then add the meat to heat it up.

This dish is traditionally served with a side of whole-berry cranberry (brusnice) sauce, whipped cream (slahačka) and a slice of cooked lemon (citrón). To make the whipped cream, simply take the unused cream from making the sauce and beat it until it turns solid. This was the first time I had whipped cream like this. It’s so much better than the spray kind. Serve with knedľa. Enjoy and dobrú chuť! That husk figurine in the picture on right is typical of traditional Slovak folk art. I wanted to put something Slovak in the picture, but the only thing I could find was this figurine from a larger advent set.

If you compare my sauce to the one served in Slovak restaurants (for instance, as shown here) you will see mine is much “chunkier”. I guess this is that home-made, metal strainer, touch.

For other great meaty Slovak dishes, check out Segedin goulash, chicken baked on salt and stuffed peppers.

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Ingredients: 8 lb sauerkraut, 1 gallon water, 3 lb of pork neck, 16 peppercorns, 4 spoons caraway, 8 cloves garlic, 8 whole cloves, tablespoon crushed nutmeg, handful dried mushrooms, 7 onions, 7 apples, 3 lbs sausage and bacon, 4 tablespoons paprika, 4 tablespoons red pepper, 1.5lb tub of sour cream, few tablespoons flour
Prep Time: 4 hours

Regular Size (~12 servings)

Ingredients: 2 lb sauerkraut, 1 quart water, 0.8 lb of pork neck, 4 peppercorns, 1 spoons caraway, 2 cloves garlic, 2 whole cloves, bit of crushed nutmeg, smaller handful dried mushrooms, 2 onions, 2 apples, 0.8 lbs sausage and bacon, 1 tablespoons paprika, 1 tablespoons red pepper, small container of sour cream, tablespoon flour
Prep Time: 3 hours

Here is a recipe for the traditional Slovak Christmas sauerkraut soup kapustnica, for 100 people. This recipe will come in handy next time your 99 closest friends ask to come over for dinner…

Ok, you may be wondering why on Earth would I be posting a recipe for such a large quantity of soup. Well, the funny thing is that because of this website, I got asked if I could prepare a dish for the St. Nicholas Day celebration at the Slovak Embassy in Washington, D.C., hosted by the Slovak American Society of Washington. I had doubts about this, given that I had never before cooked so much food. But my friends persuaded me to take this great opportunity. The recipe posted here is more-or-less identical to the kapustnica recipe posted earlier. The difference is that photos are better (my new kitchen has much more light) and that this time I used the right kind of meat, krkovička (pork neck).

This is what the ingredients for a 100 person soup look like. Everything all together cost roughly 90 dollars.

For this soup you will need dried mushrooms. Dried mushrooms taste bit different from fresh ones, since the flavor is more concentrated. If you don’t find any in your grocery store, you can dehydrate mushrooms at home by leaving them uncovered on a paper towel for several days. Or you can lay them out, single-file, in an oven turned to low heat (warm or 200F). Dehydrated mushrooms will keep for a very long time. In Slovakia, it used to be common to go mushroom picking in the fall and then dry the mushrooms for use in winter soups. My family would dry them by hanging them from strings attached between beams in the kitchen. Kind of like drying laundry on a clothes line.

Let’s start cooking. Take a large pot (I used a 16L stock pot for each of the two batches), and add your sauerkraut (including the juice) and the water (voda). You don’t have to be too specific with the water, you can always add more later. You simply want to add enough to at least cover the cabbage (kapusta).

Wait for the soup to come to boil. With a large quantity of water like this, this may take a while. Once the water is boiling, add the pork neck meat (krkovička).

Add peppercorns (čierne korenie), caraway (rasca)…

…cloves (klinčeky), bay leaves (bobkové listy),…

…nutmeg (muškátový oriešok), shredded garlic (postrúhaný cesnak),…

…whole onions (celé cibule), with the outer skin removed and ends chopped off, and whole apples (celé jablká) with stems removed.

Add a handful of dried mushrooms (sušené hríby, more the better!) and some salt (soľ).

Cover, and let cook for a while. I cook it until the apples start cracking open on the outside. For a big batch like this, this will take at least an hour.

Then, take your favorite sausages (klobása) and bacon (slanina). There is a Polish sausage store in Rockville, MD, which supposedly sells the smoked, dried up and shriveled up Slovak sausage that should go in here. But it was bit out of my way so I used various typical grocery-stocked smoked sausages. I obtained the bacon (two kinds, regular and peppered) from Laurel meat market. This is also where I obtained the homemade sausage, which I cooked the previous day.

Slice the bacon and sausage into pieces and fry. I like to fry the sausage for a bit because I think it improved its taste. Add to the pot. Strain the fat from bacon before adding it.

Also add paprika (sladká červená paprika) and red pepper (štiplavá červená paprika). I used 3 spoons of whole red pepper and 1 spoon of powder.

Add more water if you need to. Roughly speaking, the soup should be half liquid, half “stuff”. Cover and cook for additional 30 minutes.

Finally, take the sour cream (kyslá smotana) and mix in few tablespoons of flour (múka). Add in small batches, stirring in between and letting the cream dissolve.

Finally, boil for another minute or two. Also scoop out as many bones as possible. Manually pull off whatever meat didn’t fall off.

And there you have it, the traditional Slovak sauerkraut soup, kapustnica. Besides the soup, I also prepared whiskey “rum” balls. Dobrú chuť a Veselé Vianoce (Bon apetit and Merry Christmas)!

Here are just few other pictures I wanted to share. The day when I was making this soup was the first time it had snowed here in Washington, D.C., this winter. And it was quite the snowfall! The snow created a beautiful backdrop for preparing this traditional winter soup. Here is a photo taken out the backdoor in my kitchen. Cooking is also a great time to let your friends try your creation. Here is my friend Nicole tasting (and testing) the soup. I think she approved. And finally, me serving the soup at the Slovak Embassy.

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Treska is my favorite Slovak salad. So I was really excited when Kristina posted a recipe for it on the Facebook page! I made it and it turned out quite tasty. Here I show you how to make it. But, there is a caveat. When I went to buy the ingredients, I learned that my grocery store was having a 60% off sale on fillets of “blue fish”. This was a deal too good to pass! Well, this is a problem because, you see, the word treska means “cod”. So here you have a cod-free cod salad. You’ll see that when you make this salad out of the right fish, the resulting creation will be of much lighter color.

Start by preparing “vinegar stock” by combing 3 liters of water, one cup of vinegar, whole black peppercorns, 6 bay leaves and salt. Let boil for 5 minutes. Then add the fish fillets. Cook for 10 to 15 minutes. Then take the fish out and place in a large salad bowl. Let cool down.

While the fish is cooling, cook two whole peeled carrots. Place them into boiling, salted water, and cook for about 3 or 4 minutes. Let them cool down. In the mean time, finely flake up the fish with a fork. You could also use a mixer.

Next finely grate the carrots and two whole onions.

Add mayo (3/4 of this medium sized tub), …

…, two tablespoons of vinegar, 4 tablespoons mustard (I used spicy brown), …

…, black pepper and salt. Then let sit in the fridge for 24 hours. This will let the flavors mix through. Enjoy with few fresh rolls, or even better, with rožky, Slovak mini baguettes. Dobrú chuť!

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This weekend I wanted to go for something healthy, so I decided to make a soup. Here is the recipe for the Slovak sour bean soup, kyslá fazuľová polievka. This is one of my favorite soups, along with kapustnica and the lettuce soup. The beans (fazuľa) that grow in Slovakia are, well, bean-shaped, have spots and come in many different colors. I couldn’t find anything like that in my grocery store, so I ended up using “cranberry beans”. These were very much like the Slovak beans, except that they were all uniformly colored. To make the soup cook faster, you start by soaking the beans overnight. Rinse the beans, place them in a large pot and add 1.5L of water. Let sit overnight.

The dry beans

And after an overnight soak

Some people like to use fresh water, but the traditional way is to use the same water in which the beans had been soaking. Either way, the soup will turn out good. Add 2 cloves of crushed up garlic (cesnak), 2 bay leaves (bobkový list), and 3 black peppercorns (čierne korenie). I also added one potato (zemiak), cut into half-inch cubes. This is optional, but I like this soup better with the potato.

Add the ingredients and bring to boil

The soup will foam up so stick around to reduce the heat. This foaming is due to the protein in the beans changing shape (denaturing). It’s similar to what happens when you add hops when brewing beer (I’ve made couple batches of beer in the past).

Let the soup cook until the beans and potatoes get soft. This will take about 40 minutes. Then, make a mixture of sour cream, milk and flour. You want to use about 2 or 3 tablespoons of sour cream, maybe little bit more of flour, and enough milk to make the mixture liquid. Slowly pour it in while stirring.

You next season the soup. First, add salt. I ended up using about 1 tablespoon, but this is just an estimate. Next, add one teaspoon of sugar. Finally, add vinegar. I added about 5 teaspoons, but this again is just an estimate. You want to go slow, and keep trying the soup after each addition. It’s very easy to ruin it by adding too much…

Take 3 slices of smoked bacon, and cut it into small pieces. Fry the bacon for about 3 minutes. You want it to turn pink, but not crispy brown. Add into the soup, and cook for another 10 minutes, until the sour cream mixture completely dissolves.

And there you have it, Slovak sour bean soup! Enjoy!

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