If you have already decided to spend your next vacation in Bucovina, here are some tips on the local culinary recipes.
Bucovina’s food is not only meant to satiate your hunger, but also to arouse your senses. They are mainly cooked from locally grown organic foods, following old recipes, passed on from generation to generation.
Vegetables and greens play a very important role in Bucovinian cuisine. You will often find them as side or main dishes, boiled, baked, stewed or pickled. Very rarely they are fried in animal fats.
This historical region is a pastoral area and the mountains that surround it offer the cows and sheep all the necessary ingredients to give the best fresh milk. Therefore dairy products play an important role in this land’s gastronomy. They accompany all kinds of dishes, from appetizers to dessert (cabbage rolls with sour cream, the butcher’s pork and beef chops, cheese pies, etc.)
Given that over time in Bucovina people of many ethnic groups have lived, their influences are evident in the local gastronomy. Poles, Russians, Turks, Germans and Austrians left their mark on the culinary recipes.
Also known as The Land of sour cream, Bucovina adds this ingredient to every dish. Other two foods mainly used in local gastronomy are trout and ceps. The trout is smoked in fir-tree twigs and is eaten grilled or as “zacusca”. Ceps can be served as stew or as filling for cabbage rolls.
Bucovina’s gastronomy mainly uses poultry meat and fish, but there are also some culinary recipes for pork, game or beef. Soups are soured with “borș” and are thickened with a mixture of sour cream and eggs. Try the “Radauteana” soup.
Being the homeland of painted churches, it also offers some delicious fasting recipes: the mushroom pie at Dragomirna Monastery or the vegetable sausages at Putna Monastery.
The forest offers fresh and healthy food to the people. Everything that is edible is cooked here, from nettles, sorrel and garden sorrel, ramson and even beetroot. These dishes are delicious.
Desserts are not left out in the Bucovinian gastronomy either. These are usually made of doughs with different fillings. You can try the Moldavian Easter cake, the “Poale’n brau” cheese pies, the Moldavian sweet bread, the pumpkin, cheese, apple or cabbage pies.