Taste Czechia
Česko
A beer country whose food is built to go with it: roast pork, bread dumplings, cream sauces and cabbage in both colours.
Czech cooking is Central European farm food with Habsburg polish. Pork is the meat, caraway and marjoram are the spices, and the bread dumpling (knedlík) is the starch, sliced and laid next to anything with sauce. Sauces matter: the root-vegetable cream sauce of svíčková, the dill sauce, the tomato sauce. Sauerkraut and braised red cabbage are the vegetables. Lunch is the main meal, soup comes first, and a half litre of lager is considered part of it. Sweet yeast baking, poppy seed and plum jam handle dessert.
5 recipes · 1 cuisine
All dishes 5
- 15 hr 15 min
Svíčková
Svíčková na smetaně
Czech Sunday beef: roasted on root vegetables that become a smooth cream sauce, with bread dumplings, cranberries and whipped cream.
A bit of work
- 4 hr 40 min
Vepřo knedlo zelo
Vepřová pečeně s knedlíkem a zelím
The Czech national plate: caraway roast pork with its gravy, braised sauerkraut and thick slices of bread dumpling.
Medium
- 45 min
Smažený sýr
Czech fried cheese: a thick slab of Edam in breadcrumbs, shallow-fried to a crisp crust, with boiled potatoes and tartar sauce.
Easy
- 45 min
Bramboráky
Czech potato pancakes with garlic and marjoram, fried thin until the edges go lacy. Eaten with the fingers while hot.
Easy
- 2 hr 35 min
Koláče
Round Czech yeast buns with a sweet quark or plum jam centre and a butter streusel. Sunday breakfast and wedding gifts.
Medium
Regional cuisines
Think you know Czechia food?
5 quiz dishes. Optional — Passport stamps still come from cooking.
Take the Czechia food quizFood history
Bohemia and Moravia were the industrial and agricultural heart of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the food shows it: schnitzel, goulash and strudel are shared with Vienna and Budapest, but the bread dumpling and the cream sauces are Czech. Pilsner was brewed in Plzeň in 1842 and changed the world's beer. Forty years of socialism standardised the canteen menu, and fried cheese with tartar sauce is one of its lasting gifts. Since 1989 the classics have been rediscovered and cooked properly again.
Common ingredients
Techniques
- boiling bread dumplings
- roasting pork with caraway
- cream sauces from root vegetables
- breadcrumb frying
- yeast baking