Ingredients: 10 cloves of garlic, butter, 4 potatoes, 8 cups of water, 2 tsp paprika, 1 tsp caraway, salt, toast, cheese
Prep Time: Fast, 20 minutes

Peel the cloves of garlic (cesnak) and crush them using a garlic press. Alternatively you can chop them using a grater, or just slice them fine with a knife (this is what I did). Melt two tablespoons of butter (maslo) in a pot and add the garlic. Fry for few seconds.

Next add some eight cups of water (voda), 2 heaping teaspoons of paprika (mletá červená paprika), another teaspoon of caraway (rasca), and salt (soľ) to taste. Then peel the potatoes, cut them into small cubes, and add to the pot.

Boil for about 15 minutes until the potatoes get soft. In the meantime, toast a slice of bread (chlieb). I toasted mine on butter in a frying pan but you could just use a toaster. Cut the toast into squares and put them in a bowl. Then scoop the finished soup over the bread.

Finally, grate some cheese into the soup (I used Swiss) and also decorate with some garnish, such as parsley (petržlenová vnať). Enjoy!

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Ingredients: one head of cabbage, 2 tbsp of oil or lard, 1 onion, 3 tsp flour, 1 small container of sour cream, paprika
Filling: 0.5lb ground beef, 1tsp oil, rice (half a cup to a cup), water (twice as much as rice), 1 small onion, 1 egg, black pepper, one clove of garlic
Prep Time: 40 minutes

Make the filling and prepare the leaves

Start by cutting out the core from the cabbage (kapusta). Also take an onion (cibuľa), and grate it using a hand grater or a food processor. You will need two onions, one for the filling, and one for the sauce.

Stir the onion on a bit of oil until it foams. Add the rice (ryža). Next add water (twice as much as rice), cover, and cook until the rice is almost done. The recipe called for 1 cup of rice for the half pound of meat, but this made for a mixture bit heavy on the rice. Use less rice if you prefer more meat.

In the meantime, put the cabbage in a pot of hot water and bring to a slow boil. The leaves will start to fall off. Carefully remove the leaves as they come off with a knife. Next cut off the bottom stiffer part so you get a flexible leave that can be rolled. Save all pieces.

Chop the stiffer cut-off pieces into small strips. Fry for few seconds on oil along with a grated onion and paprika. Cover with water and bring to a boil.

Stir in 3 teaspoons of flour (I used Wondra) into the sour cream. Take a small amount of the liquid from the sauce pan, and stir into the sour cream mixture to dilute it. This is better than directly putting the cream in the sauce, as it will keep the cream from lumping up. Stir the diluted cream into the sauce.

Mix the meat, the egg, ground black pepper, salt, and a crushed clove of garlic. Add the cooked rice, and mix together.

Filling cabbage leaves

Start filling the cabbage leaves. Take about a teaspoon of the filling and place it to one side of the leaf. Flip one side over. Ideally, do this diagonally, as if you were making a funnel. This is not shown too well in this set of pictures.

Complete the roll, and finally tuck the end pieces in.

Cook the Holubky

Place the holubky in the sauce and cover with a lid to keep them from coming apart. This may not be really required, since I cooked some separately and they stayed together.

Cook until done, the best way to check is to take one and try it. It cooked mine for about 30 minutes, until the cabbage leaves were nice and soft. By the way, you can also cook the holubky separately. This will give them a cleaner appearance. Enjoy!

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But one dish I remember people prepare is baked eggplant, zapekaný baklažán. Eggplant is a relative new comer to Slovak cooking, but it’s quite frequently found in modern recipes. There are several ways of preparing it. In making this recipe, I followed a recipe from mimibazar. This is an extremely easy and fast recipe. You can get everything ready in about 15 minutes, and have dinner ready an hour later.

Ingredients: 2 eggplants, 4 or 5 tomatoes, 3 cloves garlic, Brie/Camembert soft cheese, sliced mushrooms, grated hard cheese
Prep Time: 15 minutes plus 50 minutes for baking

Start by washing the eggplant (baklažán) and slicing it into slices about half inch thick. Sprinkle lemon juice and salt all over. This supposedly helps take some of the bitter taste of eggplant away, however, according to Wikipedia, this is no longer necessary with the modern varieties. Let sit for few minutes.

In the meantime, lightly grease a baking pan with oil and cover with bread crumbs. These will help absorb some of the moisture released during baking. Slice the remaining “vegetables” (zelenina). Preheat your oven to 375F.

Place half of the eggplant on bottom, follow by another layer of half the tomatoes, and then all of garlic. Finally add all of the soft cheese.

Then make another layer of eggplant, tomatoes, and mushrooms. Stick uncovered in the oven for 45 minutes.

Take out once the vegetables soften. Top with grated cheese (I used Monterey Jack). Stick back in the oven for additional 10 minutes or so until the cheese browns. I increased the oven temperature to 400F for this step.

And that’s it. Quite simple. Serve with hrianka. This dish looks very nice, although I am not yet fully sold on the taste. I can’t even remember the last time I’ve eaten an eggplant before this week. It’s definitely quite interesting, especially with the Brie cheese. Bit of an acquired taste, I suppose, perhaps the way some folks don’t like the lettuce soup (it is one of my favorites!). Anyway, give it a try and let me know what you think.

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Ingredients for 40 servings: 1.5 cups oil, 3.3 lbs onions (about 8 large ones), 7lb cubed beef, water, 4 tbsp paprika, 1 tbsp Cayenne pepper, 1 teaspoon ground black pepper, 2 tbsp salt, 4.5 lbs potatoes (15 small ones), 3 tbsp marjoram, 8 cloves garlic, beer (optional)
Prep Time: 30 minutes of prep time, 2 hours for cooking

Here is what you will need for this version of goulash: beef, potatoes, onions, and various spices.

Chop the onions (cibule). The pieces don’t have to be too small since the onions will dissolve during cooking. Pour the oil (olej) into your kettle and wait for it to get hot. Then add the onions. Fry them until they get golden and glass-like translucent. Add the meat (mäso) and brown it from all sides. You can brown all the meat in the kettle but I figured it will be faster if I do one half (one 3lb packet) separately in a frying pan. If you fry your meat separately like this, make sure to pour in all the juices into the kettle. Add water. I didn’t measure how much I added in, but it was enough to get this 16L stock pot 2/3 full. Roughly speaking, you want half the soup be water and the other half meat. When adding water, it’s better to add in several small batches and wait for the water to come to boil in between each addition. This way the meat will continue to cook.

Add the spices: paprika (sladká červená paprika), Cayenne pepper (štiplavá červená paprika), ground black pepper (mleté čierne korenie), and salt (soľ). Cover and let simmer on low heat for about an hour. In the meantime, peel and cube all but two potatoes and get minced garlic ready to go.

About an hour later

Add the cubed potatoes into the goulash once the meat is almost ready. Also add the marjoram, I used both fresh and dried. When substituting fresh herbs for dried ones, use one tablespoon of fresh herbs for each one teaspoon of dried herbs.

Mince the garlic cloves and add these into the pot. Also grate the remaining two peeled potatoes using a grater. Add these in as well, these potatoes will help thicken the stew.

Finally, if the goulash tastes too thick, you can thin it by adding some dark beer. Or just add the beer regardless. I used about 1/3 bottle of “dark amber” brew. And that’s it, look at all that delicious oil floating on top!

Slovak Picnic in Turkey Run, VA

And just few photos from the picnic. I ended up reheating the goulash using this portable gas stove. This was my first time using it and it’s a really handy thing! The only issue is that the flame is really hot. It didn’t even occur to me to keep stirring the goulash while heating it up, and some potatoes on the bottom burned. So unfortunately the goulash had bit of a burned taste. But nobody really complained, I guess that’s part of the charm of eating in the outdoors…

We also had hot dogs (párky). The Giant grocery chain sells “New York deli-style” hot dogs that look and taste very much like Slovak hot dogs. By the way, hot dogs are served differently in Slovakia than here in the US. One way is to serve them in a hollowed out bread roll. These are hollowed out by a heated spike that toasts the roll from the inside. You then squirt mustard into the slot and then put in the párok. This kind of hot dog is called, quite appropriately, párok v rožku (hot dog in a bread roll). The other way of serving hot dogs is by simply placing two cooked pieces on a paper plate with mustard and few slices of rye or whole wheat bread. This way is popular at festivals where vendors may not have that fancy bread roll toasting spike.

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So I opted for pork – and ended up with the national dish of the Czech Republic. It’s vepřo, knedlo, zelo, which means, in Czech, pork, dumpling, cabbage.

The Slovak translation would be bravčové, knedľa, kapusta. See, Slovak and Czech languages can be very close sometimes, almost as if they were dialects of each other. But on many other occasions, the vocabulary is different enough to make it difficult for Slovaks and Czechs not exposed to the other language to understand each other. This actually seems to be getting more and more of a problem, as I often experience when visiting my cousins outside of Prague. The older guys have no problem understanding their Slovak part of the family. But my youngest cousin, who was born after the country split up, often gives us confusing looks. And it’s even worse with her friends. They look at us ako by sme boli Maďari (as if we were Hungarians, this is a common Slovak expression which means that somebody speaks in a way you can’t understand). The reason for all this is that during the Czechoslovakia days, TV stations played programs in both Slovak and Czech. Everyone was raised with exposure to both languages. However, after the split, this stopped being the case, especially in the Czech Republic. Slovak TV is too cheap/poor to dub movies from English to Slovak, so a good number of foreign films still get shown on Slovak TV in Czech. The opposite is not true in the Czech Republic. So even though quite a few young Slovaks still learn Czech simply from watching TV, this is not the case with the kids in the Czech Republic. I’ve heard somewhere that the Czech government is planning to start showing more Slovak programs to sustain bilingualism, but I have no idea if this is true or just rumors.

Anyway, enough history for one day, let’s start cooking! To make this dish, you will need dumplings, either the regular kind or the ones made from potato. Or both. This recipe comes from mimibazar and from Recepty Starej Mamy.

I made this dish with a 2lb piece of pork loin, but neck, shoulder and thigh meat is also commonly used. Loin is the meat from the back of the pig, which is less fatty than the belly. By the way, if you want to learn more about the different types of pork, as well how a pig is butchered, check out this amazing guide to pork cuts on Amazing Ribs. The butchering videos at the bottom of the page are great.

Ingredients: 2 lbs of meat for roasting, 4 cloves of garlic, one medium onion, 2 strips bacon, salt, black pepper, caraway, head of red cabbage, side of dumplings, 2 teaspoons sugar, 2 teaspoons vinegar
Prep Time:2 hours

Turn the oven on to 450F. Rinse off the meat and make several slices into the meat. Stuff each with garlic (cesnak) – I used half a clove per slot. You can also stuff it with bacon (slanina). Coat with salt (soľ), pepper (čierne korenie), and caraway (rasca)

Melt bit of lard in a baking dish (or use little bit of oil). Add the meat along with an onion (cibuľa) sliced into rings, and 1/3 cup of water.

Cover and place in the oven. Turn the oven down to 350F and bake, covered, for one hour. In the mean time, prepare the dumplings and cabbage.

Cabbage and Dumplings

Remove the old outer leaves from the head of red cabbage (červená kapusta) and also remove the hard core. Cut it into two halves, and then cut each half into another half like shown. This makes it easy to cut it into strips that are not too long. Heat up two tablespoons of oil in a pot and add the cabbage. Also add a dash of salt, one teaspoon of caraway, and one 1/3 cup of water. Cover and let simmer for about 30 minutes, stirring frequently.

Check to see if the cabbage is done. Add sugar and vinegar, two teaspoons each. Finish cooking uncovered. But keep an eye on it. I actually ended up overcooking my cabbage and it got mushy. Also prepare the dumplings.

Back to the meat

After the hour the meat has been baking, it’s time to turn it over. Carefully remove the baking dish out and, using a knife and a fork, flip the meat over. I had cut mine into two halves, which made this easier. Put the cover back on, and stick in the oven for another 30 minutes. Then remove the dish once again and take out the onion. Also spoon out 2/3 of the sauce into a mug. Place the glass baking dish back in the oven, but this time, keep it uncovered to roast the meat.

After 15 minutes of baking uncovered, baste the meat with the sauce in the mug. The mimibazar recipe said that basting with cool sauce helps the sauce penetrate more into the meat. Another 15 minutes, and it’s done.

Dinner is served!

You should let the meat rest before cutting (I didn’t do this, I only found that article afterwards). Letting the meat rest will allow the fibers to reabsorb moisture, leaving you with a juicier cut of meat. Serve with dumplings (I used both kinds) and the cabbage. And of course, few spoonfuls of sauce over the dumplings and the meat. Dobrú chuť!

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