So when was the last time you ate at an Albanian restaurant in your neighborhood or in a culturally diverse neighborhood when you visited a big city in America or elsewhere. Well, I've never encountered one, and around where I grew up in Yonkers, New York there was an Albanian immigrant community at that time. So I made it a particular point to discover the foods of the southern Balkans on my two weeks in Albania, Kosovo, and Macedonia, most of which was in ethnic Albanian lands.
First of all, I’m not sure how much of what I ate was really Albanian cuisine and how much was food that was more general to the Balkan region
. There was some of both and in some cases the same dish had different names in each of the three countries. By and large I found the food to be pretty good, although there was not a huge variety if I tried to stick to what seemed like Balkan food and avoided pasta, pizza, and other international or Italian dishes what are widely available. One positive aspect I found is that food in the southern Balkans is not too starchy. It tends more towards meat, dairy, and lots of fresh vegetables instead of rice, potatoes, and pasta like dishes. After nearly two months in Britain and Ireland it was so nice not to have everything come with a mound of "chips", or grease-boiled potatoes strips as I like to call French fries. There’s always a lot of bread available, but you can eat as much of that as you choose; it’s not served on the plate as what you’re supposed to eat as the meal.
One aspect of the cuisine is that there are lots of salads available in the Balkans, but they’re pretty much all variations on the same theme of tomatoes, cucumbers, onion, peppers, cheese, and olives
. Sallate Greke or Greek Salad includes chunks of feta cheese. Sallate Shopska or Shepherd’s Salad is similar but lacks olives and is covered with grated cheese instead of big chunks. Sallate Domadesh I learned the hard way is just a salad of chopped tomatoes with a little raw onion. Sallate Srpska or Serb Salad contains some pickled hot peppers while Sallate Macedon is the same general combination but includes some warm roasted peppers. Something slightly different is Sallate Mishte or Mixed Salad which usually includes several types of salad on a plate including red and white versions of cabbage slaw. A salad in southeastern Europe is not simply a bed of leaves over which to pour a creamy dressing. You don’t have to worry about getting your vitamins, but they’re also quite similar to each other and monotonous.
Menus in the southern Balkans usually have a fair number of appetizers, some of which I found to be pretty good. One of those is Perime Zagare, or grilled vegetables, usually a nice plate of grilled eggplant, peppers, zucchini, and tomatoes, sometimes served cold
. Grape leaves stuffed with rice and flavored with dill are always a winner and are called Japrak in Albania. I believe Dollma is the Turkish word for stuffed vegetables, and Speca Dollma or stuffed peppers were a good choice either as an appetizer or a side in Kosovo. In Albania, though, stuffed vegetables seemed to be called Mbushur, and I had some very good Speca te Mbushur and Patellxhane te Mbushur (peppers stuffed with rice and eggplant stuff with vegetables) at a very traditional Albanian restaurant in Tirana.
I was told several times that something called Teve Dheu was the Albanian national dish, so I had to try it. It’s sort of like a hot fondue that includes meat, onion, and cheese and is slightly spicy. One version I tried had some lamb meat in it, but another version that was part of a group meal ordered by our guide in Tirana was with more traditional liver. I wasn’t really sure how I was supposed to eat it, but it made a great spread on top of bread.
Macedonia seemed to have some rather different appetizers than the ethnic Albanian regions, including Prsut (cured ham) and brezole (air-dried beef)
. I tried a Macedonian appetizer platter once in Skopje that had these specialties along with Ajvar (sweet pepper relish), Malidzano (eggplant spread similar to baba ghanough), and Urnebes (spicy cream feta cheese spread with dried red pepper).
It has been notable in my travels that many countries that are big consumers of cheese produce what they claim to be many different cheeses, but those are actually very similar to each other in style. This is definitely the case in the Balkans where most cheeses tend to be somewhat crumbly, white or very light yellow, and bear some resemblance to Feta. There are different names for the slight variations, but I find them to be somewhat monotonous. Other dairy products include a kind of sour clotted cream that usually includes pieces of spicy yellow peppers as an appetizer spread and Ayran, a sour unsweetened yogurt drink.
Soups usually cost the equivalent of one to two Euros or dollars, so at that price I couldn’t go wrong with ordering one as an additional course to a meal
. Most turned out to be quite good. I had some really good Supe Peshku (Fish Soup) in all three countries. I tried Qorbe Bareshe (Shepherd’s Soup), a broth with lamb, yogurt, and herbs, in Kosovo and found it to be delicious. Several of the other Qorbe’s I tried were with either chicken or veal and all quite yummy.
In Albania in particular sheep seems to be the favored meat. The very traditional Albanian restaurant I went to n Tirana had virtually all lamb dishes as its main courses, many of which were innards like liver, tripe, spleen, and who knows what else. I settled for normal lamb meat called Mish Gingi, but the intensity of its flavor and thickness of its covering fat suggested it was more what I would call mutton than lamb. Meats on the menu in Kosovo and Mecadonia were somewhat more varied. Grilled meats are ubiquitous in the Balkans, ranging from Doner Kebab and shish kebab to cutlets, sausages, and steaks. Grilled ground meat dishes are everywhere
. Pleskavica is essentially a burger or a Salisbury Steak, sometimes stuffed with cheese. Ground meat rolled into small sausage shapes is called Kofte in Albania and Kosovo (as it is in most of the Arab world) but Cevapacici in Macedonia and other Slavic language countries. I quickly learned that Kofte Deshtak meant the spicy version of kofte.
I found stews to be quite common and quite good in the Balkan countries. Most I had were lamb or veal, but in Macedonia some included pork. Mavrovsko Pot was a veal stew supposedly typical of the mountains around Mavrovo in western Macedonia while Mukalica (translated as Country Meat) was an absolutely delicious bubbling pot of veal, pork, and mushrooms cooked in wine and lots of parsley. Tave Dukagjinase, a stew of lamb and vegetables, is supposed to be very typical of the region around Peja in western Kosovo and turned out to be really good as well.
Albania has enough of a coast on the Adriatic to have good fish and seafood dishes, especially grilled squid and Levrek Zgore (grilled sea bass)
. The stars inland, though, are freshwater fish like Trofte (trout) and a specialty of Lake Ohrid named Koran. I haven’t been able to figure out what that translates to in English, but I tried it both grilled and as filets in a walnut cream sauce, and the meat is very fine.
The Ottoman influence in the Balkans manifests itself in many Turkish restaurants and dishes, especially in towns like Prizren with large ethnic Turkish populations. Borek, a type of pastry similar to phyllo dough usually filled with meat, cheese, or spinach or sometimes mushrooms, is of Turkish origin but is popular all over the Balkan Peninsula. Borek can be very good, but it can also be disgustingly greasy and somewhat lacking in the tasty fillings that can make it worth eating. I also tried two Turkish dishes that bear some similarity to Pizza and Calzone named Lahmacun and Pide. Somehow they haven’t caught on it western countries the way Doner Kebab has. I don’t think I’ve ever had them or seen them except when I was in Turkey in 2006.
There’s not much to speak of in the Balkans in terms of traditional desserts. There’s Baklava and western style pastries, but most desserts are just fresh fruit or ice cream, known as Akullore in Albanian.
Beer and wine are not in short supply in either Albania or Kosovo, despite ethnic Albanians being heavily Muslim. The beers in all three countries, though, were pretty standard lagers. Some folks on my tour made a big fuss about preferring one to another of the local brands, but to me they were all quite similar in the way Miller, Michelob, and Budweiser are virtually indistinguishable to my taste buds. All in all I ate and drank well in the Balkans, but a big part of that was that food was so inexpensive and I needed not skimp on my meals. My growing belly is proof.
