Posts Tagged ‘garlic’

Fried Hamburger (Fašírka)

Ingredients: 1lb pork, 3 cloves garlic, one quarter medium onion, one egg, bread roll about the length of your open hand, milk, salt, black pepper, flour, bread crumbs, side (4 boiling potatoes, quarter of chopped up red cabbage, salt, sugar, caraway, butter, few slices of red pepper)
Prep Time: About an hour, including boiling potatoes

Nowadays, it’s easy to satisfy your hamburger craving in Slovakia. Many major cities have a McDonald’s. And even those that do not will have a myriad of street vendors selling all kinds of burgers. But, even with all this hamburger variety around, don’t forget to try the traditional Slovak take on this American staple. The dish is called fašírka, and is a juicy breaded ground pork patty fried in oil.

Or make it at home. Making fašírka is easy! I completely documented this recipe while at my grandma’s in Slovakia. But just as I was about to post it, I had a second thought. I love this dish way too much. I really wanted to make sure I can prepare it, all by myself, from scratch using American ingredients. So that’s what I did. Using the photos I shot in Slovakia, I recreated my grandmother’s recipe. It turned out great. But I’ll let you be the judge. And best of all, fašírka is another very cheap dish to make. From the ingredients, which could not have cost more than 7 dollars, I made 9 patties and enough mashed potatoes for 3 hearty dinners. Plus several sandwiches.

Prepare the side

Start by preparing the side. I served the dish with a side of mashed potatoes and red cabbage. Cook the potatoes in their skin until soft (45 minutes?). Then peel them under running cold water so you don’t burn your hands. Add butter and salt and mash them until creamy. Also chop up as much cabbage as you like. Fry it on oil for about a minute. Then add enough water to cover the entire bottom of the frying pan. Also add salt and few tablespoons worth of sugar. I also added caraway seeds. Cover and let steam until soft. Open the lid occasionally and add more water as needed.

Onto the main dish

Ingredients for fašírka. In addition you will need bread crumbs.

Slice the bread and soak in a bath of 1:1 water and milk. Season the meat with black pepper, salt, 3 grated cloves of garlic, and about quarter of a medium onion.

Once the bread is soft, grab it in your hand and squeeze out the liquid. Add to the meat and work in until no bread chunks remain. Also add flour to stiffen the meat mixture. I ended up using twice the amount shown in the photograph.

Next, place more flour in a bowl. Dust your hands with flour. Take several tablespoons worth of the meat mixture and roll between your palms. Flatten to make a hamburger. The patties I made were about 3/4 the size of my palm and about half inch thick. Dip them in the bowl of flour, and evenly cover on both sides. Set aside. I ended up with 9 patties.

Now make the dough. Combine about half a cup of flour with one egg, salt and enough water to make liquid mixture with the consistency of milk. You can also add little bit of beer if you like. Next, heat up oil in a frying pan. Then setup your “assembly line”. It starts with the flour-covered patties, goes through the dough to a bowl of bread crumbs and finishes in the frying pan.

Fry the breaded patties for about 5 minutes on each side until golden brown. One neat trick I learned at my grandma’s is to use a knife and fork to flip the patties. It works so much better than a spatula!

And that’s it. Serve with mashed potatoes, cabbage and little bit of veggies. Top the mashed potatoes with grease from the frying pan to give them the authentic fatty Slovak taste. On the left is the dish I cooked up. On the right is what I had at my grandma’s. You will notice that Slovak bread crumbs are much finer than the American variety. Also, my grandma used canned cabbage and veggies. Otherwise, I think the two dishes look very much alike. They both tasted wonderful!

You can also eat this dish on the go. In fact, it is very common for parents to prepare a fašírka sandwich for their kids before a long bus or train ride. It goes great with sliced onion and mustard. I also topped it with red pepper and a slice of provolone cheese.

Like this recipe? Then please digging, thumb up, or buzz this delicious dish. Thank you very much!

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Homemade Sausages (Domáce Klobásy)

Ingredients: 4 lbs pork, black pepper, 2 cloves garlic, paprika (sweet red pepper), red pepper, salt, pork intestines or sausage casings
Prep Time: about 2 hours

In this recipe, I show you how to prepare home-made sausage (klobása), the way my grandma makes them. I may be little biased, but there is nothing better than a real Slovak sausage! They are even better smoked (údené). Slovak sausages are pretty similar to the Hungarian variety. When I lived in Lancaster, California, I was lucky to be close to a real treasure: a little shack in the middle of the Mojave desert called “The Valley Hungarian”. That shop had an amazing selection of smoked sausages, very similar to the ones my grandma makes. Unfortunately, sausages like that are very hard to find.

Slovak sausages are somewhat similar to the German bratwurst, but are less juicy and whole lot more peppery. The spices used in the making of a Slovak sausage are garlic, sweet and spicy red pepper, and caraway. You will also need ground pork, sausage casings and a way to feed the sausages. The recipe below shows you the traditional way of making sausages as done during zabíjačka. It involves grinding pork in a meat grinder (mlynček na mäso). You may have hard time finding these in America. You may want to skip this step and start with store-bought ground meat. However, you will need some device to feed the meet into the casings, and the casings themselves. We used pig intestines (črevá).

We used a “No. 10″ Porkert meat grinder, dating all the way back to 1954! It consists of the housing, a feeding spiral, a four-blade knife, and an exit plate with circular holes through which the meat comes out.

Cut the raw meat into pieces which will fit into the grinder. Grind the meat. You will probably need to disassemble and clean the grinder few times to remove the tendons that like to wrap around the blades.

Then add about 2 cloves of crushed garlic (postrúhaný cesnak, too much garlic will make your burp!), two teaspoons of ground black pepper (mleté čierne korenie), about 1.5 teaspoons of salt (soľ), a small teaspoon of caraway (rasca), about 4 teaspoons of paprika (sladká paprika), and another teaspoon of crushed spicy red pepper (štipľavá paprika, if you like it hot). Mix together. Then remove the blades and the exit grid, and replace with a feeder tube. The sausage mix was really popular with the cat. She even managed to grab a good chunk of meat out of my hand as I was feeding the sausages!

Next take the washed intestines (črevá). You need to make sure they don’t have holes in them. This is done by blowing into the intestine and seeing if it inflates like a balloon. Then roll a 2-meter long intestine onto the feeder tube. Tie a knot at the open end. If you end up with an air bubble, take a sewing pin and puncture a hole or two.

Next comes the fun part: making sausages. This is a two person operation, with one person feeding the meat into the grinder, and another adjusting the output. You want the meat to be packed quite stiff and especially uniform. This will take bit of practice. I helped with this step for a while, but my grandma was much better at it. So I mostly worked the grinder. Tie a knot at the other end as well.

You now have one 2 meter long sausage – bit too much to eat in one sitting. To turn it into more manageable pieces, grab the sausage about 15 cm from one end. Pinch there and push the meat to the sides. Then twist the free end around two times. Fold over, and cut the other end off. Then push out some of the meat from the open end back into the grinder and twist the casing shut. This doesn’t have to be too tight; the meat mixture is quite viscous and won’t drip out.

If you also decide to prepare hurky, follow the same steps, except that the open ends must be tied shut with a string. It’s probably best to clean the grinder before making hurky, otherwise you may end up with pieces of sausage in your hurka (the red chunks). Typically, the wider beef intestines are used for hurky, and the thinner pork intestines are used for sausages. Place sausages on a wooden stick and then off with them to the smokehouse.

Or if you don’t have a smokehouse, just bake them, grill them or fry them fresh. These turned out delicious! The photo shows the typical zabíjačka platter: baked sausage and hurka, with a side of mustard, baked potatoes and beets. Dobrú chuť!

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