Breaded and fried pork cuts, like these, are very popular in Slovakia. You will find every one of the variants below in a restaurant or a Slovak cookbook under various names, often related to Slovak towns or villages. I am guessing these names are picked by the chef depending on where he had a schnitzel like that for the first time. I didn’t even bother trying to figure out what to name each, so here you have a dinner (or four) full of assorted delicious fried meats.

Ingredients: thinly sliced pork chops, cheese, ham, hard boiled egg, canned peas, flour, milk, egg, potatoes for baking and mashing, oil, salt, pepper, mustard, ketchup
Prep Time: One hour

Baked Potatoes

Before we get to the meat, let’s make some baked potatoes. Peel 2 or 3 medium sized baking or all purpose potatoes, slice them into larger wedges, place in a baking pan, coat well with oil and salt, and bake in the oven until they get brown on the outside. This will take between 30 minutes and an hour.

Onto the meats

Carefully slice the pork chops in half so they are about quarter inch thick (here is a video on this butterflying technique). Tenderize the meat by beating it on both sides with the tenderizing mallet. Salt and pepper from both sides. Then get creative. I started by making a meat sandwich. I topped one piece of pork with edam cheese (popular frying cheese in Slovakia), one slice of a hard boiled egg, ham, and topped with another pork cut.

I made another piece by topping the pork with ham (šunka) and a slice of brie.

Or you can make meat rolls. I made two of these. First one I smeared with mustard and ketchup and rolled up. The second one didn’t have any ketchup or mustard but I first topped it with a slice of ham.

Frying the meat

Now to turn these meat patties into delicious dinner, you’ve got to fry them. Here I used two types of coating: plain flour and “pancake” dough. Schnitzels coated in flour and fried in oil are said to be done “natural” (prírodne). The other kind, in dough made of flour, egg, and milk (or water) are “in dough” (v cestíčku).

Fry them, using toothpicks to keep the rolls together. Fry on both sides for a minute or two, until they get brown. When it came to flipping the rolls over, I took the toothpicks out, flipped them over, and then place the toothpicks in again to keep the roll from opening up.

Another delicious topping (which I learned about from my father who runs a restaurant in Banská Bystrica) is peas (hrášok). Just spoon these into the dough. If you have extra dough, you can even fully cover them. And there you have it, a plate of assorted fried meats. Delicious with mashed potatoes, baked potatoes, and some peas and apricots on the side. What do you think, worthy of Man vs. Food?

Here are recipes for two classic schnitzel types: wiener schnitzel and shepherd’s steak.

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Here is an easy soup recipe. It’s for hrachová polievka, pea soup. Peas are commonly grown in Slovakia. I remember as a kid going to my grandma’s house and eating them fresh from her garden. You can use them in rice dishes (like risotto), to garnish meals, or, as shown here, in soups. This soup recipe is adapted from Slovenská Kuchárka, a Slovak culinary classic. There are few different varieties of this soup in the book, but they are all much different from the thick split pea soup so popular here in the United States. This soup is a watery broth, perfect to get your appetite ready for the main course.

Start with a can of peas (hrach). Pour the contents into a pot and add enough water (5 cups worth). If you use fresh peas, first peel them, and then boil the peels. Then strain the broth, add the peas, and use it to finish the soup.

Then prepare the roux (zápražka) by browning the flour on melted butter (maslo). Add the onion (cibuľa) and little bit of water. It’s better if the onion is grated – but I didn’t read the recipe all that close until it was too late. To improve the consistency, I scooped out as many pieces as I could once the soup was done cooking, and ran them through the food processor.

Also add ground black pepper (mleté čierne korenie). This is about 10 peppercorns ground up in a mortar and pestle. And of course, salt to taste. I used quite a bit, at least 2 tablespoons.

Finally, you can make something called rajbanička. I had actually no idea what this was, but I found the recipe on nazjedenie.sk. Rajbanička is basically stiff dough that you grate (rajbať) into the soup to make tiny dumplings. Combine about 2 cups flour, one egg and just a tad of water to make stiff dough. Then grate it, using the wide holes. It helps to let the dough sit for a while so it stiffens.

Top with few leaves of parsley and serve with good home baked bread.

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Something I always look for on my travels to Slovakia is stopping in a deli for freshly baked bread rolls (called rožky) and some Parisian salad, parížský šalát. Whether this salad has anything to do with Paris is to me a mystery. At least my roommate who grew up in France has never seen something similar to this. Anyway, here is a recipe for this tasty and very simple side dish. Turns out, there are manz variations on this food. I ended up using the recipe posted here. It was the simplest of the bunch, and also resembled the most what I remember this salad being made of. Some of the other recipes called for ingredients like corn, eggs or ketchup, ingredients I don’t believe belong in this salad. But, just in case you want to experiment, I posted these variants below.

Here is what you will need. I used Bologna, since it has the closest consistency to the soft salami that is used in Slovakia.

Cut the salami (saláma) into strips. Also, either finely dice the onion (cibuľa) or grate it using the fatter holes on a food grater. One benefit of using the knife is that (if the knife is sharp), it won’t release as much of the juice which causes the eye irritation. The irritation is caused by an enzyme called alliinases which is released as the cells break. Fewer broken cells means fewer irritants being released.

Strain the peas (hrášok) and also add half the 16oz sour cream (kyslá smotana) container and 3 tablespoons of mayonnaise (majonéza).

Finally, add cubed dill pickles (zavárané uhorky), about a teaspoon worth of salt (soľ) and pepper (mleté čierne korenie) and mix through. Place in the fridge for few hours to allow the flavor mix through. Serve with bread – home made is the best!

Few variants

This recipe is very similar, but includes 6 hard boiled eggs, only one pickle, one tablespoon of ketchup, 3 tablespoons of oil, 1 tub of tartar sauce (but Slovak tartar sauce is different from the American kind). Amount of meat, onion or peas is the same.

A whole lot more complicated version is found here. Ingredients include 300g of salami, 1 onion, 3 eggs, 3 pickles, 100ml of tartar sauce, 100ml of sour cream, 200g of canned corn, 200g of canned peas, 2 tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce, 2 tablespoons of oil, 2 tablespoons of ketchup, 2 teaspoons of mustard, 1 tablespoon of vinegar, salt and ground black pepper. WOW!!! The recipe starts with a quick boil of the Worcestershire sauce, oil, ketchup, mustard and vinegar. The mayo and sour cream is added once the mixture cools down. If you end up making this version, please leave a comment on how it turned out.

Yet another version is found here. This one uses 500g (1lb) of salami, 1 container of mayo, 1 soft butter, 2-3 spoons of mustard, pickles, 1 can of sweet peas, 1 can of corn, 5 hard boiled eggs, salt, black pepper, and 1 teaspoon of powdered sugar!

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Yesterday my mom stopped here in Washington, D.C. on her way to San Francisco. I figured this was a golden opportunity to learn how she makes her really good potato salad. Here is the recipe for the Slovak potato salad, ala my mom.

Start by boiling unpeeled potatoes and 3 carrots, peeled, in salted water. At some point also hard boil 2 eggs.

Chop up about 3/8 of an onion into small cubes. For the non-math people, that’s a quarter plus half of another quarter.  The carrots are done once they get soft (check them by occasionally poking them with a fork).  Slice the carrots into thin quarter circle wedges.

Also chop up the pickles.

Combine vegetables in a pot.

Take out the potatoes when they are almost cooked through (soft outside with a slightly hard core in the middle). Peel them, dice them, and add to the pot.

Now stir in mayo. We started off with 3 spoonfuls, but ended up putting in 6.

Finally, cut up the eggs and mix into the salad. Add salt and black pepper to taste. Let sit in the fridge for few hours before serving. To see the final creation, check out the recipe for fried fish. Also, another popular Slovak salad is called treska. It is a fish salad made with onion and mustard.

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