5 Traditional Dishes You Must Try In Ukraine
Ukraine is a very underrated tourist destination. People don’t know about its beautiful pink lakes and Carpathians mountains, ancient castles and beautiful churches. There are also not a lot of things about Ukrainian cuisine that people heard of. Nevertheless, traditional Ukrainian dishes are alway full of flavour and worth trying. I made a list of 5 must try dishes while travelling in Ukraine.
Borsch and Pampushky
Borsch is a Ukrainian dish popular worldwide and has become something of a national signature dish. Borsch is a beetroot soup usually cooked in a rich pork broth with beans and served with sour cream.
Pampushky are traditional Ukrainian baked buns that are covered in garlick and almost always served with borsch.
You can find this dish in almost every restaurant that has traditional dishes or you can visit one of Ukrainian “fast foods” like Puzata Hata (not really a fast food, but a buffet).
Salo
Salo is a very special dish for Ukrainians. There are songs and stories made about salo and there is even a museum of salo in Lviv. Salo is a cured pork fat served thinly sliced together with rye bread, garlic or onion.
Salo is a great addition to Borscht or Solianka (soup made of smoked ribs and other meat). For some dishes like varenyky with potato, people cut salo into cubes and fry it to make ”shkvarky”. It is almost like fried bacon and goes well with potato dumplings.
Varenyky With Potato
The word “varenyky” means dumplings in Ukrainian. There are many kinds of varenyky in Ukraine. The most popular are with cottage cheese, cabbage, brynza, sweet varenyky with cherries or blueberries (seasonal dish that you can try in summer), and of course the most famous one – varenyky with potatoes.
You can find varenyky in many Ukrainian restaurants, there are also some places that specialize on just varenyky. You also can buy frozen varenyky in any supermarket and cook them yourself. Just don’t forget to buy a piece of salo to make shkvarky and sour cream to serve with the dish.
Carpathian Trout
Carpathian trout is one of the most famous dishes in the West of Ukraine. You can of course try this dish in the mountain regions at one of the ski resorts like Bukovel, Slavsko, or Vorokhta, but you also can find this dish in Lviv.
In the Ukrainian Carpathians trout has been cooked for many hundreds of years and has become a symbol of this region. The trout itself is a fatty fish, but cooked with wild white mushrooms under a fantastic cream sauce makes it very tender and juicy. There are of course other ways people cook this fish, but the one I mentioned is my favorite.
Liver Cake
Liver cake is another traditional dish that you must try in Ukraine. It is one of the dishes that is always present on a table during big holidays. Liver cake is made of ground liver (of course). After adding eggs and some flour, Ukrainians make pancakes out of that mix. Every layer is covered with homemade mayo and stacked on each other.
This dish is not very common in the restaurants, but you can find it in Puzata Hata and try it for yourself. I know it might not sound like something delicious, but as practice has shown people rather fell in love with this dish.
