Polish cuisine: recipes of national dishes with photos

2024 Author: Isabella Gilson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:14

For many centuries, the gastronomic traditions of Poland have been influenced by the states surrounding it. Jewish kosher food was assimilated into Polish cuisine during the reign of Jewish patronage King Casimir III, sweet dishes came from Austrian cuisine, and gourmet dishes from the French. Much of what is found on the Polish menu is taken from Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Russian cuisines. At the same time, the people managed to preserve their own national cooking habits.

Speciality of Polish cuisine

In Poland, as in Russia, they like canned and pickled vegetables, but they are prepared according to special recipes, so they have a more pronounced taste. The nutritional and calorie content of many Polish dishes is explained by the fact that the country was dominated by a patriarchal-peasant way of life for a long time, so the peasants prepared food that supported physical activity, and meat was the main ingredient for cooking.

Meat dishes are usually prepared with tsvikli sauce, consisting of ground horseradish,vegetable oil, ground pepper, vinegar and boiled beets. Once you try it, you won't want to use ketchup again, despite the fact that they are extremely tasty in Poland.

Polish cuisine features a large variety of soups that are eaten for lunch and dinner, as well as various salads and snacks. For dressing use sour cream, mayonnaise, vegetable oil, sauces. In addition, in Poland they like to consume milk and sour-milk products, sweets made from fruits (marshmallow, jams, marmalade), from alcoholic beverages they prefer beer, bison and mead.

First courses

Begin acquaintance with Polish cuisine with soups. Here they cook borsch and pickle, pea and tomato soups, cabbage soup and zhurek (it is boiled on rye flour sourdough). But the most popular soup is "chernina", which is made from goose offal and blood. To do this, you will need: goose offal (150 g), goose blood (50 ml), 1 tbsp. tablespoon of vinegar, 1 carrot, 1 large onion, parsley root (10-15 g), dried plums and berries (20 g), bay leaf, ground pepper, s alt and sugar to taste.

Goose blood is mixed with vinegar, broth is boiled from 350 ml of water, offal, vegetables and seasonings, then it is filtered and dried fruits are boiled in it. At the same time prepare lasagne - homemade noodles. When the broth boils, vegetables are returned to it, goose blood, spices, s alt and sugar are added and brought to a boil. When serving, cut offal, fruit, lazanki are put on a plate and poured with broth.

Whatmade with meat?

It is very rare to find a Polish recipe that does not use meat. It is fried, stewed, boiled, grilled, meat rolls are made. Examples of dishes can be pork loin chops with prunes, minced meat zrazy stuffed with pickled vegetables, mushrooms or pieces of smoked meats, oven-baked duck with buckwheat and apples.

But nowhere is pork knuckle (golonka) cooked so tasty as in Poland. First, it is boiled for 1.5 hours together with onions and large carrots, then cooled and placed in the marinade for 8-10 hours. For marinade in 1 liter of light beer, dissolve 5 tbsp. tablespoons of honey, add 2-4 bay leaves, chili pepper (1 pc.), 15 black peppercorns, 1-2 pcs. cloves, s alt to taste. When the knuckle is marinated, it is laid out on a baking sheet with parchment paper and baked in the oven at 200 degrees for 1 hour. Golonka is especially good with beer.

Famous bigos

Noteworthy is the famous dish of Polish national cuisine - bigos. It is prepared from meat, fresh and sauerkraut, tomatoes. Sometimes mushrooms, prunes, rice are added to the dish. To cook bigos according to the classic recipe, you will need: 1 kg of fresh and sauerkraut, 500 g of pork or beef, 250 g of smoked sausages and undercuts, 8-10 pieces of mushrooms, s alt and seasonings to taste. You will also need a couple of garlic cloves, 3 tablespoons of tomato paste.

Mushrooms, fresh and pickledcabbage is cut into pieces, mixed, seasonings and s alt are added, put in a cauldron and put on fire to stew. Meat, undercuts and sausage are cut into small slices and fried in a pan over medium heat. When the meat is ready, it is transferred to a cauldron, chopped garlic and tomato paste are added and stewed over low heat for another hour. The finished dish should be thick enough and taste slightly sour.

Polish "pies", or just dumplings

You can't consider yourself a connoisseur of Polish cuisine without trying dumplings. They can have any filling: stewed cabbage, potatoes, mushrooms with fried onions, sweet fruits and even chocolate, but dumplings with minced meat mixed with mushrooms and sauerkraut or with cottage cheese and potatoes are especially popular. The dough is made from 2-3 glasses of flour, 1 egg and a glass of boiling water.

To prepare the curd-potato filling, boil 3 small potatoes and mash them. In a frying pan, fat is melted from a piece of lard and one diced onion is fried in it, it is added to mashed potatoes, 200 g of fresh cottage cheese of any fat content is also put there and mixed well. Next, the dough is rolled out into a layer 1-2 mm thick and circles are cut out with a glass. The filling is laid out, dumplings are formed and boiled in s alted water for 6 minutes after the water boils. Served with fried onions and cracklings.

Other deli meats

All stories about Polish cuisine would be incomplete without mentioning delicious smoked sausages,which are prepared according to traditional recipes and smoked over branches of juniper and fruit trees. The composition of sausages includes several types of meat, sometimes cereals or potatoes, various spices, garlic and marjoram are added to them. Due to the high quality of the product, Polish sausages are popular all over the world. This is especially true of hunting sausages, which are superior in taste to German ones.

The recipe for Polish sausages has not changed for decades, and such a well-known sausage as kabanos has been prepared according to the same recipe for several hundred years. Other speci alty speci alties include smoked bacon, ham, pork and chicken fillets, meat pies and many more.

What about the fish?

Poles love fish as much as meat. It is worth seeing a photo of cooked carp among the recipes of Polish cuisine, and you will immediately want to eat a piece. To do this, the fish is cleaned from the husk and entrails, the head is cut off and washed well, then cut into portions. Each piece is s alted, sprinkled with pepper and sprinkled with a little lemon juice.

Grease a baking dish with vegetable oil and put carrots and onions cut into pieces on the bottom. Fish is placed on top of them, on top is another layer of vegetables and spices: bay leaf, pepper, sesame. The fish is poured with 500 ml of dark beer, the form is covered with foil on top and sent to a hot oven for half an hour. When the fish is ready, make the sauce. In a separate pan, fry 1 tbsp. a spoonful of sugar until dark, add tohim 150 ml of wine vinegar, 1 chopped gingerbread and juice, which was formed during the stewing of carp. The sauce is boiled until tender, after which it is filtered and watered over the fish.

What's for dessert?

Desserts are no less delicious in Poland: charlotte with apples, donuts with marmalade or condensed milk, cheesecakes, rolls with poppy seeds and raisins have long migrated to the recipes of dishes from different countries. Kolaczki biscuits with jam, which you can make yourself, are very popular in Polish cuisine.

For the dough you will need: 220 g of butter and cottage cheese, one and a half glasses of flour, 350 g of any jam, a pinch of s alt, and a package of vanillin or vanilla sugar, powdered sugar for sprinkling. It is better to knead the dough from flour, cottage cheese and butter in the evening and put it in the refrigerator until morning so that it becomes plastic. In the morning, the dough is rolled out into a layer about 4-5 mm thick and cut into squares with a side of 5 cm. Thick jam or jam is placed in the center of the squares, the opposite corners are pinched. Bake in the oven at 180 degrees for 15-20 minutes, sprinkle the finished cookies with powdered sugar.

Comparing the recipes of Polish cuisine with photos of dishes of Russian, Ukrainian and Lithuanian cuisines, one cannot but notice the similarities in cooking and flavor combinations. They combined all the best culinary finds of European, Slavic and Jewish cuisines, but at the same time retained their national identity.