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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Ingredients: 4 potatoes, 2/3 cups of flour, 1 cup milk, small onion, bacon bits
Prep Time: 30 minutes

Peel and cube several potatoes (zemiaky). While they are cooking, chop one small onion (cibuľa) and few strips of bacon (slanina).

Once the potatoes get soft, strain most of the liquid out into a cup. Add flour and mash everything together. Then add the liquid back. Also add salt to taste.

If the porridge is too thick, add another cup of water or milk. You could also use less flour but then you end up with less porridge…

Bring the porridge (kaša) back to boil while stirring so the potatoes don’t burn your pan. At the same time, fry the onion on small heat. I started by first frying the bacon on small heat to render the fat. After about 5 minutes, I added the onion and also a bit of butter. Cook the porridge until skin forms on top and the porridge starts “puffing” all over the place. Fry the onions until they are crunchy.

Top with the onions and bacon and serve with a glass of milk or kefir. There you have it, Slovakia’s second national dish!

Fučka is one of those foods that surely originated during the times when the pantries were less plentiful than today. It’s a super rich and filling dish (sýte jedlo). You won’t be hungry again for half a day after one bowl like this. If you want to put your family on a little financial diet, try serving this porridge few times a week. You could save some real money!

This porridge doesn’t have to be topped with bacon, or even onions. There are other popular toppings, including bryndza or fried cabbage. Feel free to experiment with whatever you like. And if you don’t know what the number one national dish of Slovakia is, it’s bryndzové halušky. Another popular traditional dishes are bryndza pierogi, and strapačky.

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Today I came back from a four day conference (International Conference on Plasma Sciences in Norfolk, VA) to an empty fridge. An almost empty fridge. Besides one lonely yogurt, some cottage cheese and a stale nut roll, it contained one potato, about half a bag of sauerkraut, and fried bacon bits left over from making cabbage dumplings. In other words, just the right ingredients for making baked potatoes with sauerkraut, the dish from the times when money was scarcer and pantries less plentiful.

Ingredients for two plates: one potato and about 0.8 lb of sauerkraut. Also caraway seeds and some oil. I used bacon bits and the rendered fat. Feel free to throw in a sausage if you have some.

Peel and slice the potato and rinse the kraut.

Grease the bottom of a baking pan – I used half of the melted bacon fat. Then take half of the potato slices and make a single layer out of them. Mix the drained sauerkraut with about a tablespoon of caraway seeds and add on top of the potatoes. Also throw in some bacon bits for a good measure. Then top off with the remaining potatoes, pour on the rest of the grease and bacon, and also salt lightly. Then stick the pan into a 375F oven (I bake pretty much everything at 375F) and leave for about 30 minutes. About 20 minutes into baking, the kraut started looking tad dry, so I added just half a small glass of water. Also, while the potatoes were baking, I remembered I had a tiny bit of sour cream left in the fridge, about 1/6 of a cup. Mix this with an equal amount of water, and whisk well. Then when the potatoes are almost ready, pour the sauce in and bake for few more minutes. This is not required, but the cream definitely gave the meal a very nice taste.

This dish goes great with a glass of milk or kefir. Enjoy!

For another cheap, yet filling potato recipe, check out bacon potatoes.

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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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My friends Chris and Patricia came for a weekend visit during my 2010 trip to Slovakia. They live in or near Munich. I took them on a short country tour: Bratislava (the capital), Bojnice (fairytale castle and a spa) and Banská Bystrica (my beautiful hometown). And of course, the tour involved much sampling of Slovak food. Chris very much enjoyed the Slovak cuisine, but Patricia was little less impressed. See, Patricia is vegetarian and as it appears, in Slovakia, bacon is considered to be a vegetable.

In keeping with this tradition, in this recipe I show you how to prepare a really easy, tasty and quick “vegetarian” soup. It’s made of mushrooms, potatoes, and of course, bacon.

Ingredients for Slovak mushroom soup

Start by putting salted water (in a pot, of course!) on the stove. Then peel potatoes (zemiaky), rinse them off and cut into cubes. Add these into the pot. Also, rinse off the dried mushrooms (sušené huby or hríby) and add to the pot. The rinse is just in case – I actually found a twig of sorts in the finished soup.

While the potatoes are cooking, start preparing bacon bits (škvarky). Cut the bacon (slanina) slices into small pieces and fry them. It helps to drain the fat, this seems to decrease the time needed for the fat to melt away. At the end, drain off most of the fat (tuk) and add about two spoonfuls of flour (múka). Brown this mixture and add to the pot once the potatoes and mushrooms are soft.

Then add two spoonfuls of sour cream (kyslá smotana). Let everything go through boil and you are done. Very easy! Serve with good bread. The bread in the photo is my home-baked rye bread.

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