Five Serbian Dishes and Drinks You Need to Try During #WCEU

You’ll probably overeat during your stay in Serbia, because if you leave something on your plate, your host or a chef in the restaurant may think that you didn’t like the food. 🙂 We like and respect food a lot. You will not find many restaurants with modern molecular cuisine but mostly ones with either domestic or Italian food.

It’s always a good idea to try some local food when travelling to a new county, so we’ve prepared a list of dishes you shouldn’t miss.

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Top 5 Serbian Dishes

Sarma

There are two different ways to prepare Sarma. The first, and more specific for Serbia, is with sour cabbage leaves. The other way is to prepare it with green leaves, grape or chard.

Sarma is prepared by filling the leaves with rice, minced meat, and spices. Leaves get rolled and cooked slowly in water with a bit of oil, smoked meat, and spices. It is served warm with salad and potatoes if it’s a cabbage leaf sarma, and with sour cream if it’s a green leaf sarma.

Kajmak

Kajmak is a highly nutritious salty milk product, similar to clotted cream, which is mostly served as a spread with warm bread or proja. The traditional way of making kaymak is to boil milk at 100°C, then boil it gently for a couple of hours at a lower temperature. When the milk gets warm (and not hot) the cream is skimmed off and left to cool down. Kaymak has typically about 60% of milk fat. If it’s older it has a thick consistency. The lighter one has a creamy consistency and is less salty.

Gibanica

Gibanica is the most popular pastry dish in Serbia. It’s very often served on festive occasions or as a family snack. In Serbia, the dish is eaten for breakfast or dinner and often served at traditional events such as Christmas, Easter, and Slava. It’s mostly served with yogurt or other sour milky products. Its name comes from the verb “gibati” which means to fold, rock or swing, since that is the way it’s prepared.

Proja

Proja is one of the easiest and cheapest pastry dishes to prepare. Because of the simplicity of preparing it and its very basic ingredients, you can try to prepare one while you are reading this post. 🙂 Since it’s sometimes called cornbread, all that you need to prepare it is fine corn flour, oil, salt, and baking soda. You can find the recipe everywhere on the internet. However, this might not be a native Serbian dish, as they modified it by adding some cheese, bacon or ham, which turns Proja into a tasty appetizer, breakfast or dinner.

Pasulj

In Serbia, we have an idiom “simple as pasulj” which is equal to “as easy as pie” or “a piece of cake”.

Pasulj is a simple bean soup cooked with kidney bean as the main ingredient. To give it a rich taste, it is cooked together with smoked meat, bacon, and ham. Another way to prepare it is by cooking it in the oven until it gets almost dry with no sauce. That dish is named “prebranac” and it’s sometimes gratinated with a mixture of flour, breadcrumbs and powdered red pepper. When it’s prepared in this way, it is always served with grilled sausages.

 

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Top 5 Serbian Drinks

We don’t have any specific juices to be proud of, so the focus of this section is on alcoholic drinks. A lot of Serbian traditions, holidays and celebrations are related to our drinks. We have festivals dedicated to beer, Rakija, and wine. Popular hard alcoholic drinks in Serbia are produced from fruits and the softer ones are produced from honey or grape.

Rakija Šljivovica or “Plum Brandy”

Šljivovica is the most popular and most traditional drink in Serbia. You can’t have any celebration without it. Rakija is a name given to an alcoholic drink made from the distillation of fermented fruit. It is a clear-as-water kind of drink, with a percentage of alcohol that can range from approximately 40% to 65%. You might think that Rakija is similar to brandy or schnapps and that there’s nothing new here. But, in fact, there lies an entire world to be discovered, as Rakija has its own tradition, its own rituals, and particularities.

You can find Šljivovica in many other Slavic countries and it is prepared in a similar way.

However, the name Šljivovica is coming from a Serbian word for plum “Šljiva“ which is one of our national fruits as well as one of the export products with the second place in the world after China. In Serbia, there are a lot of rules for Šljivovica manufacturers. The first and most important is the plum cultivar used for distillation.

We use domestic cultivar Požegaca for Šljivovica. In other countries, very often you see yeast, starch, and sugar added during the fermentation of the mixture. This is strictly forbidden in Serbia.

After legal disputes, following the compromise of 2007, “Serbian Slivovitz” became Serbia’s first certified national brand.

Medovača

This brandy is made by mixing 1kg of honey and 7g of propolis with 4l of Rakija (brandy).The ingredients are mixed and left to form a uniform colour and density. Brandy has a golden-yellow colour with a slight scent and aftertaste of honey.

Medovača/honey brandy is a traditional natural beverage. It falls into the category of a liquor and has a healing effect. It is considered good for circulation, as a remedy against bacteria and viruses, and helpful for improving appetite and digestion. It is recommended that it be consumed chilled.

Serbs use many of the common fruits of the region like apricots, pears, grapes (similar to the Italian grappa), and even quince.

The design of the special glass “čokanjčić” makes it taste better. When you drink medovača from a shot glass or other type of glass, it is not the same. Medovača is a great way to start a meal or a social evening.

Beer

Beer has been a favourite light alcoholic drink in Serbia since the 15th century.

At the moment we have three major breweries run by Heineken, Carlsberg, and Molson, all of which produce both domestic brands and foreign beers. The most popular local beers are Jelen and Lav, followed by Jagodinsko and Zaječarsko. Serbs mostly drink pale beer but there are some dark beers being produced as well.

Vinjak

Vinjak is a brandy produced by Rubin, the Serbian alcohol drinks manufacturer, and it is a fully natural product derived from grapes. The root of its name comes from vino (the Serbian word for wine).

Vinjak is a light brown colour and it contains around 60% of alcohol which defines it as a hard alcoholic drink. In modern times, it is very often mixed with energy drinks like Guarana or Red Bull. Like French cognac, Vinjak is labeled with VS (Very Special), VSOP (Very Special Old Pale) or XO (Extra Old), depending on its age.

White Wine

As Serbian wines are not so popular and wines are not the drinks that we are proud of, there is one type that you should try while you are here. The white wine, Smederevska, in combination with soda or sparkly mineral water is a very refreshing alcoholic drink on the same level as beer. In Serbia, that drink is called špricer and you can even buy it in cans, both with white and rose wine.