Lithuanian cuisine: dishes you must try!

Lithuanian cuisine is unique!  If you are from Southern Europe or from America, Lithuanian dishes will be very unusual for you. You either love or hate Lithuanian cuisine, but you won’t be indifferent. You won’t find many light dishes or salads in traditional Lithuanian cuisine. Lithuanian dishes are rich and fat. People in Lithuania used to work hard and had to eat high-calorie food to stay strong during our cold winters. Most of our dishes are made from potatoes. Here are a few examples of traditional Lithuanian cuisine you must try:

Cepelinai (zeppelins)

Cepelinai or didzkukuliai are potatoes dumplings with meat inside. They are usually served with spirguciai (fried fat pork meat), fried onions and sour cream. We love this dish! It is good! But if you are used to eat light food, don’t eat too much, because it is not easy digestible food and you may have stomach problems.

Vegetarians can try version of cepelinai with curd inside.

Saltibarsciai (cold bortsch)

Saltibarsciai is cold soup very popular in summer. Perfect dish on a hot day! This soup is made of beets, sour milk, cucumbers, dills, hard-boiled eggs, green onion. We usually eat saltibarsciai with hot boiled potatoes. Beets give bright pink colour to this soup, so it looks a little odd… But it tastes good!

Rye-bread

Dark bread is very popular in Lithuania, you can find many versions of it in supermarkets. But my advice for you is to try rye-bread called Bociu or Vilniaus baked by Vilniaus duona, because they have real traditional flavor. Rye-bread has an original sour flavor and is very different from wheat bread. In Lithuania we eat rye-bread every day. We like it with soup, we make sandwiches of rye-bread and sausage etc.