Category: Ukrainian Recipes

Ukrainian cooking is built on what the land gives and what keeps through a long winter: beets, cabbage, potatoes, buckwheat, cured pork fat, soured milk. Most of it is village food that was never written down, which is why the same dish changes its name and its method every hundred kilometres. Borscht has no single correct recipe. The Poltava version is not the Carpathian one, and neither is wrong.
The recipes here come mostly in pairs: the traditional method as it is actually cooked, and a healthy adaptation that changes what needs changing and leaves the rest alone.
Soups. Borscht is where to start, with its keto and plant-based versions, and kapusniak, the sauerkraut soup that carried households through February.
Dumplings. Varenyky, filled with potato and farmer cheese in winter and sour cherries in July.
Main dishes. Holubtsi, cabbage rolls braised until the leaves give way; banosh, the Carpathian corn porridge stirred in cream and finished with brynza; and kulish, millet cooked over a field fire.
Breakfast. Syrnyky, farmer cheese pancakes, and nalysnyky, crepes rolled around sweet or savoury fillings.
Sides. Deruny, potato pancakes fried until the edges go lacy.
Breads. Pampushky, garlic rolls that exist to be torn apart over a bowl of borscht, and paska, the tall Easter bread.
Sweet and to drink. Kutia, the wheat berry pudding that opens Christmas Eve, and uzvar, dried fruit compote served beside it.
Cooking for a holiday: Sviata Vecheria, Malanka, Maslyana, Velykden.