In Transcarpathia, a real banosh is boiled over a fire so that it is saturated with the aroma of smoke. But in our urban conditions this is quite problematic, and I decided to try to cook it in my faithful assistant multicooker, since all cereals are perfectly boiled in it, and corn is no exception.

Banosh is often boiled on liquid sour cream mixed with milk. I didn't want to sour taste, and so I decided to replace sour cream with cream, fatty. You can do the same, mix cream with water, sour cream with milk or water, in general, there are a lot of options - experiment!

Pour milk and cream into a slow cooker and turn on the express mode, so that it boils faster, salt abundantly. As soon as boiling has begun, switch to stewing mode and add corn grits.

Now we cook, stirring constantly, so that the cereal does not burn, until full readiness... It depends on the cereal, but on average it takes 15 to 30 minutes, try it. A ready-made banosh must have semi-liquid consistency like semolina porridge.

While it's cooking, cook the cracklings. For them, I took lard from the subcutaneous meat, and cut it into rather thick slices. Fry lard in a pan until golden brown. The amount of lard is also on your conscience, you can take more if you like lard. Pour the prepared banosh into a bowl, sprinkle with cracklings and pieces of fresh feta cheese. I also peppered with fresh black pepper.

Preparation

Let's start by preparing the required ingredients. You will need: corn grits (take fine grinding), milk, sour cream, mushrooms (frozen mushrooms are perfect, for example, but it is permissible to take others), onions.



Now you can start cooking directly. Arm yourself with a cast iron boiler or saucepan. Also prepare a large wooden spoon. Now you need to pour milk into a saucepan and add a little water. Add salt and send the pot to the stove. Bring to a boil. When this happens, you need to pour in the corn grits in a thin stream, stirring continuously. Reduce heat to low and continue cooking. In this case, you need to constantly stir the food. Then you can add either cream or sour cream. The total cooking time for cereals is 25-30 minutes. It directly depends on the grinding.



At the same time, you can prepare the remaining ingredients. Take black ground pepper, salt and feta cheese. Greens should be washed, dried and chopped immediately.



Now take the pork, wash it and dry it. Slice lard small pieces. Send the skillet or stewpan to the stove, add a little vegetable oil... When it gets hot, fry the bacon. You can salt and pepper a little.



When ready, greaves can be taken out and transferred to a separate container.



Now take the onion, peel it, wash it and dry it. Then slice onion half rings.



Then send the onions to the skillet where the greaves were just fried. Fry the onion until light golden brown and add the mushrooms there (if necessary, peel, wash, dry and chop if you are using fresh ones). Mushrooms also need to be lightly fried. Grate feta cheese into a separate bowl. You won't need much of it.



Now everything for a Transcarpathian Banush is ready: both the base and the filling. Take a serving bowl and put some corn porridge cooked in milk and sour cream into it.



Then put onions, greaves and mushrooms around the perimeter of the plate. Sprinkle the Hutsul dish on top with grated feta cheese and chopped herbs. You can serve the dish on the table. No additional additives are required. This is independent dish that will please taste everyone. Bon Appetit!

Many people are interested in the cuisine of which country the food belongs. Banosh is a Ukrainian cuisine dish that has Hutsul and Transcarpathian varieties. The differences in the recipes are insignificant and lie in the addition additional ingredients such as sour cream or cream.

Banosh (banush) is, one might say, a rich relative of such dishes from corn flour like polenta and hominy. Only it is not prepared with water, but with cream or sour cream. The banosh comes from the Carpathians and their environs, it is especially common in Ukraine, in the Hutsul cuisine, but other neighboring peoples also know it, albeit under slightly different names. Some consider banosh a festive dish, others say that it is the first meal for hard-working peasants to keep up their strength. They eat banosh with rennet cheese crumbled on top, with cracklings, with mushrooms, with an egg or just like that.

Obviously, there are so many families - there are so many ways to cook banosh. Some swear and swear that the real banosh is only on sour cream. Others are breastfeeding for the cream. Still others strive to dilute this or that with milk or broth. Of course, there are also such "unbreakable rules" as stirring with a stick rather than a spoon, cooking in a pot over a fire, etc. etc. I decided to try a banosh with cream for a start (simply because I had a lot of cream at hand, but I didn't have so much sour cream). But now I also want sour cream, by all means! Not because I didn't like it with the cream - I liked it too !!! But now it’s curious: WHAT COULD BE TASTER ?!

Banosh, like many vintage dishes, is calculated not in weights, but in volumes, product ratios. It is logical: they had cups and bowls, but the overwhelming majority of the population did not have measuring glasses and scales. So try on like this: for one volume of cornmeal, more than four volumes of cream, but less than six (too liquid). Volume ready meal approximately equal to the volume of cream. Are you oriented?

The amount of salt and sugar depends on what you plan to eat the banosh with. If you take a teaspoon of both for the amount of flour and cream that I took, then the taste will be generally just normal: there you can additionally fry the cracklings from salted lard, and take the cheese more vigorously.

Banosh cooking strategies are also different. I have chosen for myself essentially steaming. For this, the cream is first brought to a boil.

Then the pan is removed from the heat, and corn flour is poured into the hot cream in a thin stream. By the way, in this case, you can even stir it with a whisk, it turns out evenly, without lumps! Then the pan is returned to the lowest heat (1 on the electric stove) and left there for 20 minutes.

After the steaming time has elapsed, the fire is at maximum, and we begin to actively stir the corn mass. But we do not interfere with it anyhow, but in general - in a circle. At some point, you will see that the entire mass has formed into a single lump, which easily separates from the bottom and "dances" around the mixer.

Banosh is ready when it starts to "sweat" with oil, i.e. there is a clear separation from the corn mass, it is clearly visible. The crust on the bottom is not a stick, but an exceptional yummy !!!

What can I say about the finished dish? TASTY INCREDIBLE !!! One of those dishes, when you overeat to the point that you can no longer eat, but it is also impossible not to eat up to the very last crumb. This is incomparably tastier than polenta or hominy, and I have no idea why there are any other cracklings and cheese there? And so you can swallow your tongue! I don’t know, maybe the fact is that my cream was thirty percent, and the Carpathian peasants took some less fatty ones? Anyway, tomorrow I'm making banosh again, for an encore!

Every Hutsul hostess knows how to cook a banosh: to graze a cow on an ecologically clean meadow, milk it, collect cream, sift corn grits and send it all in a cast iron to the oven, or even better, to the fire. If all of the above is not at hand, do not be discouraged, banosh is in the city, at home it is also excellent.

5 main rules of the Hutsul banosh

Banush, banosh, tokan - it is called differently in different parts Carpathians, this is by no means everyday, but Sunday or holiday dish... There is a simple explanation for this: it is cooked exclusively in cream, not milk, and to get 1 liter of cream (for 3-4 servings), 10 liters of fresh milk is needed.

No flour! Only finely ground cereals, since the total cooking time is no more than 30-35 minutes, and large fractions will not have time to cook during this time, and if you increase the cooking time, the dishes will come out too fatty and steep.

Metal tools inevitably spoil the taste of food - during cooking, it is vigorously stirred with a wooden spoon or spatula.

You heard right, get in the way corn porridge in Hutsul, it takes all 30 minutes while it is cooked, and this is necessary not only so that there are no lumps. Banosh recipe does not contain ready-made butter- it is formed in the process of heating the cream and does not allow the groats to stick to the walls of the cauldron.

You can cook tokan tasty, tender and with the right taste only in a cast iron cauldron and over low heat. Of course, you can try to bungle a Carpathian delicacy in modern technological dishes, but good result it is impossible to guarantee in this case. Why? Because cast iron heats up slowly, but the heat is evenly distributed in it, it lasts a long time, and you need to try hard to burn food.

3 main features of a banosh

It is called the ceremonial version of hominy - an everyday very steep corn brew popular in Western Ukraine and Moldova. In Georgia, it is also known as gomi, in Italy - as polenta, in Serbia - kachamak, in Turkey - muhlama. A similar dish exists in completely exotic countries like Antigua and Barbuda and is called there ku-ku, but the Hutsul version cannot be confused with anything:

tokan is eaten only hot and never served chilled, like hominy or kachamak;

it is still porridge, which is eaten with a spoon, and not cut into chunks, like polenta;

the concept of "banosh" includes a set of several dishes - the actual hot cereal base, fresh homemade cheese and guslyanka - a fermented milk drink, which in the Carpathian region is called "Hutsul beer" for its anti-hangover qualities. In some regions or houses, all this is supplemented with greaves.

How to cook a guslian with your own hands

In the Hutsul region, if a guslian is suddenly over, they take the sourdough for it from the neighbors, although sometimes you have to walk a couple of kilometers and climb the mountain, but you can do it on your own.

Ingredients:

milk - 1 l
sour cream - 1 tbsp. l.

Homemade fresh milk boil, pour into a thick one and leave to cool to 42 degrees Celsius. Then add a spoonful of sour cream and, without stirring, leave in a warm place. Cover the neck with a clean cloth, not a lid, and wrap the dish in something warm. After 12 hours, put in the refrigerator, after 24 hours the drink is ready.

3 secrets of delicious banush

To get real food at the exit, the contents of the pot must be mixed in one direction.

In the Carpathians, it is also boiled in sour cream, but the taste will be much sour and buttery, since cream is a whole milk product with a fat content of up to 35%, and sour cream is fermented milk, but more fatty - up to 58%.

Previously it was believed that the most delicious banush is obtained by men and only for open fire, and this is the only statement, the veracity of which the author did not have time to verify personally.

Preparation:

time - 30-35 minutes

servings - 2-4

Ingredients:

cream - 500 ml

very finely ground corn flour - 1 tbsp.

salt - ½ tsp.

feta cheese - 200 g

guslianka (kefir, yogurt, gerolact) - 500-700 ml

Sift the corn grits through a colander, and set aside the remaining grains on the mesh. Repeat the operation. Pour the cream into a cauldron and bring to a near boil. Salt. Pour the grits into the cream in a thin stream and stir immediately with a wooden spoon. You remember that you should stir in one direction and quite intensively. Watch when droplets of oil appear on the surface, and the mixture begins to lag behind the walls of the cauldron - from this moment, interfere, even rub, it must be especially carefully so that it does not burn, but after 3-5-7 minutes it will be ready.

Put the finished banosh on ceramic plates (and if you warm them up a little in advance, it will only be better), on a separate dish or on a wooden board, serve feta cheese, pour a guslian or other fermented milk drink and, if you want to make the table even more satisfying, add cracklings.

This is how they cook favorite dish hutsul in Verkhovynsky, the highest mountainous region of the Ukrainian Carpathians on the border with Romania. Enjoy your meal!

Hutsul banush (banosh) - everyday dish in the mountainous regions of the Ukrainian Carpathians, 3-4 times a week it must be on the tables at local residents... Once upon a time banosh was considered the food of the poor, and now this national dish treat tourists in the best Hutsul restaurants.
However, the indigenous Carpathian residents claim that the Hutsul banush at home or on restaurant kitchens you can't cook. A true Transcarpathian banosh is cooked only on a fire in large cauldrons, due to which it acquires unique taste, saturated with the aroma of haze.
And then what to do for those who do not have a fire and a cauldron, but would like to try banosh? To deviate a little from the Carpathian traditions and still make it in your kitchen. The recipe below with a photo will help you cope with this wonderful Ukrainian dish... In addition to cornmeal, soft goat or sheep cheese, as well as cracklings - fried bacon, preferably underwire with a slot. Porcini mushrooms are often added to enhance the flavor.
Hutsul recipe Banusha involves the use of corn flour, which is used to bake bread and tortillas. In urban conditions, it can be replaced with the finest grits, which practically will not affect the taste of the finished dish. To give a characteristic aroma of haze, it is recommended to use it for cooking. smoked bacon or bacon.

Taste Info Second: cereals

Ingredients

• corn flour or finely ground cereals - 100 g;
• sour cream (20% fat) - 1 tbsp.;
• water - 1.5 tbsp.;
• salt - 0.5 tsp;
• feta cheese - 30 g;
• bacon - 50 g.

How to cook Transcarpathian banosh on sour cream with feta cheese and cracklings

Pour sour cream into a cauldron or deep frying pan and dilute it with water. If the sour cream is liquid, you can use it in pure form undiluted, increasing the amount to 2.5 glasses.


Put the sour cream on the fire, bring it to a boil and add cornmeal or grits little by little.


We introduce corn flour in a thin stream, stir quickly with a wooden spoon so that no lumps form.


Add salt and continue to cook over low heat, stirring continuously so that the corn porridge does not burn.


After 15-20 minutes, the porridge will thicken, it will be easy to separate from the walls of the cauldron or frying pan, small droplets of fat from sour cream will appear on its surface. This means that it is ready, remove it from heat, close the lid tightly and let it evaporate for 10-15 minutes.

Meanwhile, cut the bacon into small oblong pieces or small cubes, then fry in a hot pan until golden brown. If desired, diced onions can be added to the melted cracklings, which will make the banosh dressing more flavorful.


We spread the corn porridge on plates, pour it with fat and cracklings on top and sprinkle with cheese, crumbled or chopped on a coarse grater.


Serve the finished banush hot without stirring.

Advice:

• the Hutsuls themselves recommend serving salted cucumbers to the banush;
• do not use metal dishes to stir the banush, only a wooden spatula or spoon, the metal is oxidized and due to this, sour cream (cream) can curdle;
• banush on sour cream has a slightly noticeable sourness, if someone does not like this taste, you can use cream instead of sour cream.