🇸🇰 Slovakia
KapustnicaSlovak sauerkraut soup
The Slovak soup of sauerkraut cooked with smoked meat and sausage, with dried mushrooms in many regional forms (and dried plums and cream in the Nitra version), eaten at Christmas and through the winter.
Origin and history
Kapustnica is the sauerkraut soup of Slovakia, tied to Christmas but, as Coolinari and Zľavomat say, cooked at other times of year too. Noviny notes that Slovakia has no single Christmas soup and that Christmas soups originally expressed thanks for the harvest and a wish for abundance. It describes regional forms: a classic Bratislava one with meat, cabbage and sausages, a Hungarian-inspired Nitra form with dried plums and sour cream, and a Gemer form always with mushrooms.
Make it at home
- Makes
- 6 servings (about 3 litres)
- Total time
- 2 h
- Hands-on
- 40 min
Ingredients
- 500 g1.1 lb sauerkraut (kyslá kapusta), not rinsed if you like it properly sour
- 500 g1.1 lb pork neck (krkovička), cut in small cubes
- 250 g9 oz smoked pork ribs or other smoked meat, in one piece
- 2 smoked or homemade pork sausages (klobása), sliced after cooking
- 15 g1/2 oz dried mushrooms (sušené hríby), optional but usual at Christmas and in Gemer; rinsed, soaked in hot water for 30 minutes, keep the water
- 1 onion, finely chopped, split between the two pots
- 2 small potatoes, peeled, diced
- 2 cloves garlic, chopped
- 1 tbsp lard
- 2 tsp sweet red paprika
- 1 tsp ground caraway
- 2 bay leaves
- a few allspice berries
- 3 l3 quarts water, plus the mushroom soaking water if used; add as you like for thickness
- salt and black pepper, to taste
- sour cream and crusty bread, to serve
Method
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1. Melt half the lard in a large pot and soften half the chopped onion for 5 minutes. Add the caraway, bay leaves and allspice and stir for a minute.
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2. Add the pork neck and garlic, dust with the paprika, season and stew, covered, in its own juices for 5 to 10 minutes.
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3. Pour in the water (and the strained mushroom soaking water and drained mushrooms, if using), add the smoked meat, and simmer for 1 hour.
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4. In another pot, soften the rest of the onion in the remaining lard, add the sauerkraut and the sausages, season, and stew slowly until the cabbage is soft, about 30 minutes.
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5. After the hour, add the potatoes to the meat pot and cook until tender, about 15 minutes; top up with water if the soup is too thick.
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6. Slice the sausages into rounds, take the smoked meat off the bone and cut it small, and stir everything with the stewed cabbage into the meat pot.
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7. Simmer together for 10 minutes, adjust seasoning, and serve with a spoon of sour cream and bread.
Notes
- Families differ and there is no single correct recipe. Coolinari, whose quantities and method this follows, leaves out the flour roux and the mushrooms in its everyday version (its Christmas kapustnica always has dried mushrooms, with or without sweet cream), and says some people rinse the sauerkraut while it prefers it properly sour. A Cejkov village version in Zľavomat uses mushrooms and thickens the soup with a roux of lard, onion and red paprika, and serves it with bobaľky (small baked dumplings) or crusty bread.
- Noviny describes the Nitra-area version as Hungarian-inspired: dried plums, a lot of sour cream and a lot of meat, with a smoother texture. To try it, add a handful of dried plums with the potatoes and stir in extra sour cream at the end. The Slovak-American cook at Slovak Cooking adds apples, nutmeg, cloves and a sour cream and flour finish.
- In Gemer, Noviny says, the soup traditionally always included mushrooms, as wild mushrooms were plentiful in the forests when meat was too expensive.
- Without sauerkraut juice the soup is milder; if your sauerkraut is very sharp, rinse it briefly.
- It keeps for 3 days in the fridge.
Adapted from Coolinari.sk: Kapustnica (recipe card), Zľavomat.sk magazine: Kapustnica from Cejkov, Noviny.sk: Rybie hlavy, lekvár aj slivky, čo všetko pláva vo vianočnej polievke Slovákov, and Slovak Cooking: Kapustnica.
At the festivals
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