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Highlights of traditional
cuisine include: goveja juha (goveya yooha)
- a clear beef broth with noodles or dumplings;
pršut (prshoot) - a Parma-like cured
ham that invariably comes from very small local
makers; klobase - sausages and salamis; potica
(potitsa) - the national cake, made with
walnuts; and gibanica (gibanitsa) - from
the north: the cake of champions.
I (a British bloke) make
a very good Potica. So there. |
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Given the astonishing quality of cuisine available in Slovenia, we are about to open a new website - eatslovenia.com - that is dedicated to... astonishing quality of cuisine available in Slovenia.
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 Happily
for us, but sadly for you, Slovenia has been done a
great disservice in recent times, gastronomically speaking.
One famous guide book said that Zemono had a 'posh restaurant' (one of the best restaurants
we've ever eaten in), while the other didn't mention
it at all. Then again, one of our broadsheets ran an
article about a little-known festival (even in Slovenia)
where the locals trap dormice and eat them (cooked,
we think): a bit like basing an overview on British
cooking on the Cooper's Hill cheese rolling festival.
Just like the rest of Slovene culture,
the cuisine is influenced
by geography and history, while its uniqueness comes
from local ingredients. By far the heaviest influence
is Austro-Germanic, so you'll find plenty of meat dishes,
soups, pulses and carbs. However, you will also find
plenty of Italian-based dishes, while the cuisine of
the Balkans and Hungary also feature. Most restaurants
source their produce locally and ingredients tend to
be seasonal. It's actually quite difficult to find a
bad meal in Slovenia: indeed, the Slow
Food movement has really started to take a hold
and many restaurants have 'signed up' to its worthy
cause.
As well as some great restaurants
(some world-class), there are hundreds of little inns
(gostilne), tourist
farms and pizzerias dotted about the country.
We would certainly recommend that you try them: the
cooking is invariably very good and you will find some
exquisite local dishes (we still can't forget the gnocchi
with truffles we had at one place).
 For
such a small country, Slovenia is blessed with an astonishing
range of wines. This is
largely due to a hangover (!) from its socialist past,
as wine growers were limited to no more than 9 hectares
of land. To ensure that all their grapes were not in
one basket, most growers have developed a number of
grape varieties, including a few unique to the area.
The upshot being that some great wines are produced
in comparatively small quantities. Consequently, the
Slovene wine industry doesn't produce wines of sufficient
quantity to really develop their export market (with
notable exceptions like Movia and Simčič).
Luckily for us, this means that we always have new and
exciting wines to try - every year.
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