Cuisine

Delicious Ethnic Cuisine Dishes

Fragrant pork, stewed in pots with sour cream and mushrooms, fish soup from a pike, a potato dumpling with cracklings — all this is the Belarusian ethnic cuisine!

The most important vegetable on a table of the Belarusian is considered to be potato. More than 1000 dishes are prepared from it! Fried and boiled, stewed and mashed potatoes act both as garnish and as the basic dish. Even if you don't like vegetables you will not be able to refuse from Belarusian draniki, potato griddle cakes with special sauces, — they are so fragrant and copious!

Every possible salads are prepared from cabbage, carrots, beans. The seethed beans, with garlic and linseed oil is one of the most ancient Belarusian dishes.

You do not share vegetarian tastes? Then pay attention to dishes from pork which takes a special place in the Belarusian cuisine. There is a tradition in villages to stab a pig and do sausages in the beginning of winter, salt down lard and make polendvitsa — dried salty meat.

The most copious meat dish is machanka. It is pork or sausage slices fried beforehand, and then stewed in a pot with sour cream. Machanka is good with griddle cakes or oladushki which are dipped right in the pot. Mushrooms also enjoy great popularity. They are cooked in sauce, stewed with meat or marinated.

An integral part of any dinner is soup. It can be hot or cold. Hot mushroom krupenya will warm you in dank autumn evening not worse than a mulled wine mug. Holodnik, on the contrary will be pleasant in hot summer midday. Holodnik is a beet soup. Sorrel and two kinds of onions — ordinary and spring onions — are added to it, and plenty of sour cream.

Traditional Belarusian beverages are kvass, krupnik and krambambulya. If you wish to enjoy the national Belarusian ethnic flavour to the full, go and taste all of them. Kvass is prepared from birch sap and infused on grain crusts. Krambambulya was created by gentry representatives about 200 years ago. It is a strong alcoholic beverage, infused on spices. Krupnik is a "mix" of an extract from fragrant herbs, strong alcohol and honey. Bon appetit!