Czech cuisine

Czech cooking is meat in a thick sauce and the dumplings that collect it. Everything else here is secondary.

Dumplings are not a side dish but a tool. They are barely salted and barely seasoned precisely because their job is to soak up sauce rather than compete with it.

Czech sauces are thick and often sweet-sour: svíčková on roots with cream and lemon, goulash on onion, rajská on tomato. Flour, if it appears at all, appears sparingly.

2 dishes

  • Svíčková na smetaně

    Beef in a purée of root vegetables with cream, served with dumplings, lingonberry and lemon.

    190 min · Takes practice · Main course

  • Trdelník

    A ribbon of yeasted dough wound round a spit, baked and rolled in sugar and nuts.

    110 min · Medium · Dessert