Preparing products
To prepare real bigosYou will need a lot of ingredients, the quantities indicated are for 6 servings. Let's start with the most important thing - meat. For bigos, you need several types of meat: 400 g of pork and beef, 300 g of smoked brisket and 200 g of smoked sausage. Many housewives add sausages instead of smoked sausage. But this is wrong, since real bigos should have a smoked smell. The second important ingredient is cabbage. You will need 700 g of fresh cabbage and 500 g of sauerkraut. Some recipes suggest using only sauerkraut, without adding fresh. If you do not have sauerkraut, you need to prepare it in advance. Of course, you can use only fresh cabbage, but then it will no longer be bigos. There are two recipes for pickling cabbage: with brine and without it. Sauerkraut without brine is very easy to prepare. Chop the cabbage, grate the carrots. Knead the cabbage well with salt, add the carrots, mix and leave under pressure. After a few days, put the finished cabbage in a jar. To enhance the taste, cranberries are often added to the cabbage. When preparing cabbage with brine, there is no need to knead the cabbage. You just need to chop the vegetables and pour in the brine, which is prepared as follows: add two tablespoons of salt and the same amount of sugar to 1.5 liters of warm water and mix. In addition to meat and cabbage, for bigos you need 2 cloves of garlic, 3 tablespoons of tomato paste, one large carrot or two small ones, 6 prunes and 150 ml of dry white wine. Some recipes suggest using red wine, also dry, instead of white wine. Sometimes dried apricots or even an apple are added instead of prunes. Some bigos recipes also include onions, but in Poland onions are not added to this dish. If you decide that it will taste better with onions, then you will need 2 small heads. From the spices according to the traditional recipe, prepare salt, ground pepper, peppercorns (allspice) - 6 pieces, 0.5 teaspoon of caraway and 1/4 teaspoon of coriander. Classic bigos is prepared in a cauldron.
Staged cooking of bigos
Once all the ingredients are ready, you can begin.Heat the cauldron and put the smoked chicken breast cut into small pieces on the bottom. While the fat is being rendered from the breast, wash the meat, peel the vegetables and remove the pits from the prunes. If you are using onions, cut them into small cubes, grate the carrots, preferably a coarse one, and put the vegetables in the cauldron. While the vegetables are frying, cut the pork and beef into not very long slices. Put the meat in the cauldron, add a little salt and pepper and leave to stew over low heat. Simmer the meat for about 40 minutes, stirring occasionally. Mix the tomato paste with wine thoroughly, add the coriander, cumin and allspice crushed in a mortar and pour the resulting sauce over the meat. Some housewives, in the absence of wine, mix the tomato paste with water, but then the resulting dish loses its aroma. Finely chop fresh cabbage, salt, knead and put in a cauldron. Immediately add sauerkraut. If the sauerkraut is sour, you can rinse it. Leave to simmer over low heat. After 30 minutes, add diced smoked sausage and prunes into the cauldron. If necessary, add a little water and simmer for another 40 minutes. Bigos is ready! It can be served!
The modern version of the preparation of biogas
Every housewife who prepares bigos especiallyIf she does not live in Poland, there is a recipe for this dish. Modern chefs prepare bigos in a multicooker. The ingredients are the same as for classic bigos. Pour some sunflower oil into the multicooker bowl, then layer the meat, vegetables, cabbage, prunes, pour the sauce over everything and simmer for an hour and a half. After the specified time, turn on the "Bake" or "Fry" mode for 7 minutes. Bigos is often cooked in pots. To do this, pre-fry the onions and carrots, fry the meat in a separate frying pan until a light crust appears and simmer the sauerkraut. Then place all the ingredients in pots, cover with puff pastry and cook in the oven for an hour at 200 degrees. Those who do not like meat prepare bigos with fish. Pike perch goes well with cabbage. Since the cooking time of pike perch and cabbage is different, the cabbage is stewed separately with the other ingredients, and the fish is fried in small pieces in flour. 15 minutes before turning off the cauldron, the fish is added to the cabbage. Some housewives add their favorite products to bigos: raisins, bell peppers, mushrooms. What else to cook for bigos If you want to surprise and please your loved ones, prepare a whole lunch of Polish cuisine. Bigos is considered a second course. You just have to prepare the first course, a drink, a salad and dessert. Let's start with a salad - potato with beans. The recipe is very simple. While the bigos is stewing, boil 4 small potatoes in their skins and 300 g of green beans. Cut the potatoes into cubes, if the beans are long, cut them in half, add salt and season with mayonnaise. The salad is ready! Let's move on to the soup. We will prepare tomato soup with cucumber. To prepare it, you will need 1 kg of tomatoes, 2 tbsp of rice, 1 l of meat broth and 100 g of sour cream. Cut the tomatoes into small pieces, boil and rub through a sieve. Add the broth and rice to the resulting tomato mass. Cook the soup over low heat for 20-30 minutes until the rice is ready. A couple of minutes before turning off the heat, add sour cream. Cut the cucumber into rings in a tureen and pour in the cooled soup. For dessert, you can make a cherry pie. Its recipe may surprise you: the pie is not made from dough, but from wheat bread! Grease a baking dish with butter, sprinkle with breadcrumbs and put on it pieces of wheat bread without crusts, previously dipped in a mixture of milk (half a glass), egg and vanilla sugar (half a glass). Put pitted cherries on the bread and sprinkle with sugar. Put a second layer of bread on the berries and pour the remaining milk mixture over everything. Bake the pie in the oven for 20 minutes. Finally, let's move on to the drink - pumpkin jelly. Grate 100 g of peeled pumpkin. Dissolve 7 g of starch in water and pour it into 130 g of hot milk. Add 4 teaspoons of sugar and 1 teaspoon of vanillin. Add pumpkin and cook for 10 minutes. Polish cuisine recipes differ from the dishes we are used to. But this is a fantastic way to add variety to your table and get to know part of the culture of another country, not so far away from us.
