Polish Food, Snacks, and Drinks

We are now in Warsaw, arriving yesterday to our final Polish location. It’s Sunday and the first day of the trip with enough rain to keep us in our hotel room. We had drizzle and sprinkles of rain, never even enough to use our umbrellas. Today, however, it’s raining enough to create deep puddles on the cobblestone sidewalks. So, time to talk about food and drink! Pierogis aren’t the only good food we’ve found in Poland, although the pierogis have been delicious.

At our Poznan hotel’s breakfast, one of the items available was stuffed pickled peppers. We were walking thru a local market later and found them for sale. I bought 200 ml (about 7 ounces) and ate them for my lunch that day. Absolutely delicious and the best I’ve eaten, preserved sweet peppers, with a slight heat, filled with a cross between cream cheese and feta cheese, in an herbed oil.

Although potatoes are native to Peru, they have been welcomed for centuries in Poland. We had delicious individual potato casseroles, with layers of cheeses and mushrooms. (Poland is the world’s largest exporter of mushrooms.)

I tried the Polish cabbage rolls. They were good, but I prefer the sarmale cabbage rolls of Slovakia which are more seasoned.

Poles love to serve soup and stews in bread bowls. I had goulash in a bread bowl one evening. Phillip had a pork cutlet which was just like a German schnitzel at that meal, so I didn’t get a picture of it. My goulash had tender meat and lots of mushrooms. I could only eat the top of my bread bowl with the goulash as serving sizes are quite substantial.

Since it has been cool here, high temperatures usually in the 50s, we’ve eaten hot soup several times. Phillip’s go-to soup is mushroom, which he says is very mushroom-y and usually served with noodles in it. Early in the trip, I tried zurek, the Polish sour rye soup. It is a flavor that Phillip would not like, as it is slightly sour, but I found it delicious and have eaten it at least four times. I plan to try the zurek in Warsaw to see if there’s any regional difference.

I’ve written more about my favorite foods, but here’s one that Phillip really liked, sauteed chicken livers. He said they were the best chicken livers he’s had, cooked with onions and mushrooms, tender and savory.

Zabka is a convenience store chain with a store on every block. They advertise a hot dog with condiments in a tube of bread. We decided to try it for lunch one day. The Zabka we stopped at had sold out of the 6 zl (about $1.50) hot dogs, so we got the kielbasa ones (about $2). The kielbasa was already on a roller grill (just like our QT and Racetrac hot dogs). The clerk put the bread tube on a grill to heat it and add grill marks. Then, she squirted the condiments in the bread tube and dropped the sausage in. It was quite tasty and the mustard coated the enclosed sausage all the way to the final bite, but it wasn’t messy because the tube of bread had a bottom.

This is our very favorite snack in Poland. Bacon-flavored. Not just flavored, but thoroughly flavored, as in they taste like eating crunchy bacon strips even though they are some type of corn/wheat snack chip. We go thru almost a bag a day of these. They were 3.5 zl (about 80 cents) in Wroclaw and Krakow, 4 zl here. Notice the bag size, they’d be at least $3-4 in the US. 

Phillip has ordered chocolate milk shakes. In Poland, a chocolate milk shake is blended cold milk and chocolate. No ice cream or the thickness he was expecting. As he said, it is what they say it is, shaken flavored milk. Still tasty to him, he just no longer expects an American milk shake!

Cherry is a popular flavor in Poland. We tried these tea bags this morning after breakfast. I’ve seen them at our previous hotels, but usually we just have coffee and water. We’ve been missing out as the “tea” from this bag doesn’t taste like tea but rather concentrated cherry juice. We will be drinking more of it this week.

And, speaking of cherry, I mentioned the cherry vodka that our Krakow hotel presented us. It was so delicious that we went looking for it in Krakow to bring some home with us. Zabka and the souvenir stores sold some type of cherry alcohol, but we didn’t buy any of it. I found a liquor store just off the main market square in Krakow. True infused vodkas, cherry and many other flavors, three shelving units of these glass containers! We tasted quite a few of them. The shopkeeper sold bottles, so we bought several 200 ml bottles, and she siphoned our selections into the bottles. Then she wrapped the bottles securely in bubble wrap for travel. We did go back the next night to get more, including one that was not securely wrapped, to drink while here.

We still have five days of Polish eating, followed by a few days of eating in Spain, so maybe we’ll find more notable foods to share.