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Mar 19, 2014

Serbian National Cuisine

Serbian cuisine is the mix up of influences of many conquerors, but also has a great variety of characteristic food.

Preparing meals is a special ritual in Serbian home and that makes kitchen the central place in the house. There are three main meals for a day: breakfast, lunch and dinner. Lunch is the most plentiful and most important meal, so if it is possible the whole family is gathering around the table. Plenty of bread is must have for every meal, especially home made which is consumed with almost every kind of food.

Vegetable or meat soups and broths are always on the table so Serbian women usually make them once in the week in very large amounts, cook them for several hours and later add pasta or noodles to daily use and make the different meal every day. Main meal usually consists of some vegetables and meat mixed in famous mousaka, sarma or stuffed peppers. Something that makes Serbian cuisine famous abroad is rostilj, especially pljeskavica (grilled minced meat made like a beef steak), cevapi (small rolls of mixed minced meat) and Karadjordjeva snicla. To make material for rostilj, masters of that job mix several kinds of minced meat, add lot of spices including red pepper and garlic, but exact formula they use is secret and that makes Serbian rostilj unique.



Salads in Serbian cuisine are also made in specific way. One of them is tursija, pickled mixture of green and red peppers, green tomatoes, small cucumbers, cauliflower and carrots. Furthermore, there is pickled cabbage, that is unforgettable for all Serbs who leave their own country and make it wherever they live all around the world. Another salad special for Serbian cuisine is ajvar, known as the "Serbian vegetable caviar".


To make ajvar you have to roast red peppers and then leave them in closed dishes for some time to rest. Next you need to remove skin and seeds off the peppers and then ground them. At this point grounded peppers are then mixing with oil, salt and garlic and cooking for several hours to reduce water.

Finally, prepared ajvar is putting into glass jars and closing with a tight lid. Some other specialties that are always on the table when a large company is gathering are kajmak, kacamak and gibanica, a kind of pie.

Many meals known as Serbian national specialties are not even in the vocabulary of other nations, so their names are hard to translate. So if anyone wants to uncover the secrets of Serbian food, he should let the experienced chefs lead him through that fantastic journey.

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