Bigos is a traditional Polish recipe with pork. Step-by-step recipe for preparing classic bigus (bigos) with photos Traditional Polish bigos

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Bigos is considered a traditional Polish dish. However, there are legends that the recipe for this dish of meat and cabbage came to Poland from Lithuania, and the Polish king, also known as the Lithuanian prince, Vladislav Jagiello, brought it there. Whether this is true or not is now impossible to know. But it’s a fact that bigos are very popular in Poland!

Real bigos is prepared over several days in large quantities: it is simmered and cooled, simmered and cooled. Then they put it in a cold place (usually in the underground) and eat it for a week, or even longer.

But in modern urban conditions this is not possible. Firstly, there is no underground, and secondly, there is no time to prepare one dish for many days. Therefore, the recipe for Polish bigos is simplified. But this does not mean that it turns out tasteless.

We prepare products

To prepare real bigos you will need a lot of ingredients; the quantities are indicated for preparing 6 servings.

Let's start with the most important thing - meat. For bigos you need several types of meat: 400 g each 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 call for using only sauerkraut, without adding fresh cabbage. If you don’t have sauerkraut, you need to prepare it in advance.

You can, of course, use only fresh cabbage, but then it won’t be bigos.

There are two recipes for sauerkraut: with and without brine. Sauerkraut without brine is very easy to prepare. Chop the cabbage and grate the carrots. Mix the cabbage thoroughly with salt, add the carrots, mix and leave under pressure. After a few days, transfer the finished cabbage to a jar. Cranberries are often added to cabbage to enhance the flavor.

When preparing cabbage with brine, there is no need to mash the cabbage. You just need to cut the vegetables and pour in the brine, which is prepared like this: add two tablespoons of salt to 1.5 liters of warm water, the same amount of sugar and mix.

In addition to meat and cabbage, for bigos you need 2 cloves of garlic, 3 tbsp. spoons of tomato paste, one large carrot or two small ones, prunes - 6 pieces and 150 ml of dry white wine. Some recipes suggest using not white wine, but red, also dry. Sometimes dried apricots or even an apple are added instead of prunes. Some recipes for bigos also include onions, but in Poland they do not add onions to this dish. If you decide that it will be tastier with onions, then you need 2 small heads.

From seasonings according to the traditional recipe, prepare salt, ground pepper, peppercorns (allspice) - 6 pieces, 0.5 teaspoon of cumin and 1/4 teaspoon of coriander.

Classic bigos is prepared in a cauldron.

Step-by-step preparation of bigos

When all the ingredients are ready, you can start.

Heat a cauldron and place smoked breast cut into small pieces on the bottom. While the fat is rendering from the breast, wash the meat, peel the vegetables and remove the pits from the prunes.

If you use an onion, cut it into small cubes, grate the carrots, preferably a coarse one, and put the vegetables in a cauldron. While the vegetables are roasting, cut the pork and beef into not very long slices. Place the meat in a cauldron, add a little salt and pepper and leave to simmer over low heat.

Simmer the meat for 40 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Mix the tomato paste and 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 tomato paste with water, but then the resulting dish loses its aroma.

Thinly chop fresh cabbage, add salt, remember and place in a cauldron. Immediately add sauerkraut. If the sauerkraut turns out sour, you can rinse it. Leave to simmer over low heat.

After 30 minutes, add diced smoked sausage and prunes to the cauldron. If necessary, add a little water and simmer for another 40 minutes.

Bigos is ready! You can serve it to the table!

A modern version of preparing bigos

Every housewife who prepares bigos, especially if she does not live in Poland, has her own recipe for this dish.

Modern cooks prepare bigos in a slow cooker. The ingredients used are the same as for classic bigos. Pour a little sunflower oil into the multicooker bowl, then layer the meat, vegetables, cabbage, prunes, pour sauce over everything and simmer for an hour and a half. After the specified time has passed, turn on the “Baking” or “Frying” mode for 7 minutes.

Bigos are often prepared in pots. To do this, pre-fry onions and carrots, in a separate frying pan - meat until a light crust appears and sauerkraut is stewed. Then all the ingredients are placed in pots, covered with puff pastry and cooked in the oven for an hour at 200 degrees.

Meat-lovers prepare bigos with fish. Pike perch goes well with cabbage. Since the cooking time for 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 foods to bigos: raisins, bell peppers, mushrooms.

What else to prepare for bigos

If you want to surprise and delight your loved ones, prepare a whole lunch of Polish dishes. Bigos is considered a main dish. All you have to do is prepare the first meal, drink, salad and dessert.

Let's start with a salad - potato and beans. The recipe is very simple. While the bigos is stewing, boil 4 small jacket potatoes and 300 g of green beans. Cut the potatoes into cubes, if the bean pods are long, then cut them in half, add salt and season with mayonnaise. Salad 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. spoons of rice, 1 liter of meat broth and 100 g of sour cream. Cut the tomatoes into small pieces, boil and rub through a sieve. Add broth and rice to the resulting tomato mass. Simmer the soup over low heat for 20-30 minutes until the rice is cooked. A couple of minutes before turning off, add sour cream. Cut the cucumber into rings into the tureen and pour the cooled soup.

For dessert, you can make cherry pie. His recipe may surprise you: the pie is made not from dough, but from wheat bread! Grease a baking dish with butter, sprinkle with breadcrumbs and place pieces of crustless wheat bread on it, after dipping them in a mixture of milk (half a cup), egg and vanilla sugar (half a cup). Place pitted cherries on bread and sprinkle with sugar. Place 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, we 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 vanilla. Add pumpkin and cook for 10 minutes.

Recipes of Polish cuisine differ from the dishes we are used to. But this is an amazing way to diversify your table and get acquainted with part of the culture of another country, not so distant to us.

Entire poems were dedicated to this dish:
“...Yes, bigos is a delicacy, a special composition,
Where is the combination of all the spices and seasonings.
Sauerkraut is crumbled there with love,
She gets into her own mouth, as the saying goes.
The cabbage is sweating, steaming on the fire,
Underneath, a layer of meat languishes in the depths.
But the boiling juices have fermented
And drips splashed along the edge with steam,
A very strong aroma crawled along the clearing...” (Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz).

Bigos is still known today in Lithuania, Belarus, the Czech Republic, and Germany, but only in Poland did it become a national dish. I read many recipes for bigos; before I knew only one - with mushrooms. It is believed that Polish bigos is distinguished by the presence of sauerkraut and fresh cabbage at the same time; a dressing of toasted flour and the addition of dry wine are required at the end.

There is an opinion that bigos is something yesterday, stale - this is because to prepare it they chopped up cabbage and everything that was in the house from leftover meat, smoked meats, and pickles. Also, bigos is something cut, chopped, and also the food of hunters, as well as revelers and revelers (probably due to the spicy sweet and sour taste). I chose the recipe for bigos in Old Polish style. This dish is something between the first and second: if you want it thicker, just use less broth; if you want it thinner, vice versa. Cabbage should be 2/3 of the meat.

Friends, bigos (bigus) is an old traditional Polish dish that is very rich in flavor. It consists of cabbage (fresh and pickled), meat and smoked meats.

But today there are already a huge number of variations of this dish. For example, as is happening with us, Polish housewives also keep their culinary secrets accumulated by experience, and use all sorts of tricks to prepare a dish.
wants to tell you how to cook classic bigos - with cabbage, pork and smoked meats. This recipe can be an excellent basis for experimentation, because there is no certain strictness in the recipe for Polish bigos. The composition of the products can be supplemented or modified at will depending on personal preferences and product availability. It should be borne in mind that cabbage will always remain unchanged, both fresh and pickled, as well as meat and smoked products. After all, these products are the main ones for Polish food. But the more different meat products are present in a dish, the tastier it will be!

This dish is perfect for cold weather. Thanks to the high content of meat fillers, bigos turns out to be very filling, and cabbage also saturates the body with essential vitamins.

However, if you love, then I strongly advise you to cook bigos, I am sure that this dish will become your favorite!

Now let's look at the step-by-step preparation of bigos, the recipe is provided for you step by step with photos.

White cabbage – 400 g
Sauerkraut – 250 g
Pork – 600 g
Any smoked meat – 250 g
Carrots – 1 piece
Onions – 2 pieces
Garlic – 2-3 cloves
Tomato paste – 2-3 tablespoons
Dry white wine – 200 ml
Salt and pepper - to taste
Pork lard - for frying

Let's select a heavy saucepan and put several chopped pieces of lard in it to heat.
To prepare bigos, any pan with a thick bottom, for example, cast iron or a cauldron, is suitable.
Sauté peeled and grated carrots in melted lard.
Wash the pork, cleared of fibers and film, cut into medium pieces and place in a saucepan with the carrots.
Fry the meat over high heat until a light brown crust forms.
Although you can adjust the degree of roasting yourself.
Add tomato paste to the meat.
You can use crushed tomato puree instead.
Wash the cabbage, chop it finely and add it to the pan.
We will also put sauerkraut there and squeeze out the brine with our hands.
Some housewives, before adding sauerkraut, rinse it under running water to wash off some of the salt and remove the sourness. You can do it too. But here, it should be borne in mind that when washing the cabbage, most of the beneficial substances will be washed off from it.
Mix the ingredients well and put the dish on the stove to simmer over low heat after boiling for about 20 minutes.
After this time, add the smoked meats cut into bars and peeled garlic cloves into rings.
Pour in the wine, season with salt and pepper and leave to simmer the dish over low heat for about 30 minutes with the lid closed.

Ready bigos can be served immediately after cooking.

They eat it either on its own or with any side dish, for example, boiled potatoes or rice.

Bon appetit!

I suggest watching a video recipe on how to cook traditional Polish bigos.

Bigos is oneo one of the most famous and popular dishes of Polish cuisine. This is specialThis dish is also present in Lithuanianand in Belarusian cuisines. The dish is so specialdelicious, like borscht or forUkrainians, because notm almost every Pole grew up.

In real Polish bigosThere are so many ingredients that in Polish evenThere is an expression "narobić bigosu", which means to make trouble or disorder, and the word itself"bigos" in a figurative sense means actually "a mess" "a mess", because in bigosThere's so much mixed in! And all Poles know wellAnd, many of them often use, a phrase from the famous comedy, a classic of Polish cinema, "Jak rozpętałem drugą wojnę światową" ("How I started the Second World War"), the hero Frankand Dolas "O rany! Ale narobiłem bigosu!" (Contextual translation: "Oh God! NI made a mess!", and in the original "bigosa"). Accordingly, the importance of this dish in Polish cuisine becomes cleare and culture. And nothing surprising! Bigos is very aromaticwow, deliciousyummy and satisfyingohthe dish thatit's hard not to love if heoh well cookedO.

And as with every dish of such importance in culinary culture, there are many recipes for making bigos. Each cook brings something different, but most of the ingredients remain unchanged, only each has their own order of adding them and some secret element of the dish. But everyone will definitely tell you that a good Polish bigos should be rich in flavor and have a pleasant aroma of smoked meats and dried mushrooms...

Sometimes bigos is prepared only with sauerkraut, but more often with sauerkraut with the addition of fresh cabbage, since itthe taste is then more balanced. It is also believed that the more types of meat, the better! And if it is possible to add game meat, then it couldn’t be better! But smoked meats and fresh meat must beO. Just like dried mushrooms. Sometimes, modernBigos can also be prepared without mushrooms, but believe me, the aroma and taste are completely different!

All ingredients for bigosbut essentially the same ones that were used in Old Polish cuisinee. Prunes and wine add their own expressive flavor note. And apples that are completely boiled give, as they say, "body"about" dishesy!

Polish bigos is a complexThis dish does not require a side dish or, conversely, meatadditions. And my Polish husband cannot imagine fully enjoying a dish without light bread and butter. According to him, with suchaddition, bigos tastes betterreveals itself :-).

And one more thing, if possible, prepare bigos in advance, a day, or even better two, or even three, before the planned serving, heating it every day, at least once a day. Like , real Polish bigos becomes better with every heating, and is also perfect for freezingleftovers and it becomes even better from this. I prepare the dish one day in advance.

6-7 servings

Ingredients

30 grams dried mushrooms (preferably white)
300 ml boiling water
1 onion, cut into cubes
100g smoked lard, cut into cubes
1 kg meat (pork, chicken, beef), cut into large cubes
300 grams smoked pork ribs
500 grams homemade smoked sausage, cut into rough rounds
1 kg sauerkraut
500 grams fresh white cabbage, shredded
5 juniper berries
2 bay leaves
1 tsp dried marjoram
3 allspice peas
1/2 tsp. black peppercorns
10 pieces. prunes
150 ml dry red wine
3 apples, peeled, grated with large holes
1 tbsp. honey
Salt to taste

Cooking time: 4 hours

1) Place the mushrooms in a deep bowl and pour boiling water over them.

Leave for 20 minutes. Strain, reserving the liquid, and chop finely.

2) Place sauerkraut and fresh cabbage, ribs, prunes, two types of peppers, marjoram, bay leaves, juniper and mushrooms, along with the strained liquid, in a large saucepan or kettle with a thick bottom.

Simmer over low heat for about an hour, covering loosely with a lid.

3) Brown the lard in a large frying pan, and when enough fat has rendered out of it, add the onion. Simmer until soft.

Finally, we are preparing bigos (or bigus) - a very tasty, satisfying and aromatic second course based on cabbage and meat. It is traditional for the cuisines of countries such as Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus. There are a huge number of options for bigos recipes, and today I propose to take a closer look at one of them. Bigos in Polish - please love and favor!

You can write about bigos for as long as you can cook this second dish. But I will try not to torment you with my lyrics and keep it to a few lines. So, to prepare this dish, it is customary to use a mixture of sauerkraut and fresh white cabbage, fatty meat (pork or game), any smoked meats, onions, and seasonings. Polish-style bigos usually contains mushrooms (dried or fresh, depending on the season) and wine (originally red, but I prefer white).

In addition, prunes and raisins are added, but I do not use them, since my family does not have such additives.

found recognition in this dish. Sour apples, red currant or plum jam, tomato concentrates (paste, sauce or juice), natural honey or flour dressing - all this also has the right to exist as a supplement to bigos.

It takes quite a long time to prepare bigos (sometimes it takes almost the whole day), but it is worth it. The essence of cooking comes down to sequential stewing of sauerkraut and fresh white cabbage, separate frying of meat and onions, after which all components are stewed together on the lowest heat for a long time.

It must be said that the correct bigos will be ready only on the third day. Yes, yes, only after 3 days will this dish, so to speak, ripen - this is what connoisseurs and connoisseurs think. In other words, you prepared the bigos, let it cool completely, then on the second day you stewed it again, cooled it again, and only after the third heating can the cabbage and meat be served.

For our realities, this method is hardly suitable: what kind of housewife would do such a thing, leaving her family to starve? But it’s still worth a try: just cook a lot of bigos, eat some of it right away, and keep the rest (cool and heat) as expected. By the way, bigos tolerates freezing well, without losing its taste and texture, so it can be prepared for future use.

When finished, bigos has a rich color (bronze hue), a bright smoked aroma, a pleasant sour taste and a very thick consistency (there is no liquid at all). Bigos must be served hot, accompanied by black bread and a glass of ice-cold vodka (this is not mandatory).

Sauerkraut (1 kilogram) White cabbage (500 grams) Onions (300 grams) Pork (300 grams) Smoked sausage (150 grams) Frankfurters (150 grams) Dry white wine (200 milliliters) Pork fat (100 grams) Water (800 milliliters) Dried porcini mushrooms (40 grams) Coriander (0.5 teaspoon) Bay leaf (1 piece) Ground black pepper (0.25 teaspoon) Table salt (1 pinch)