Is it potential for consolation meals to deserve the standing of a nationwide treasure? I’m about to seek out out. Tour information and meals knowledgeable Karmela Karlovic and I are seated inside the courtyard of La Struk, a Zagreb restaurant dedicated to strukli – a dish so honored that it’s a hallowed entry within the Register of Cultural Property of the Republic of Croatia.
Stalls and consumers at Zagreb market.Credit score: Stipe Surac
Whereas we wait, my tastebuds tingling in anticipation, Karlovic runs me by way of the fundamentals of strukli utilizing a useful diagram depicting its preparation (she is nothing if not organised). First you’re taking filo pastry and roll it very skinny. Then you definately cowl the dough with a filling product of crushed eggs and svjezi cheese, a fragile comfortable cow’s cheese. Roll it up, cowl it with bitter cream, lower it into smaller items utilizing a ceramic plate (not a knife), then bake till golden brown.
Simply jotting that down has made me hungry, much more in order I’m surrounded by strukli admirers within the engaging surrounds of the restaurant’s courtyard, with its picturesque stone wall and shady timber. Although to inform the reality, my fellow diners are rebels of a form – as La Struk daringly ventures past traditional strukli to provide fashionable variants containing elements similar to walnut, honey, apple, roasted capsicum, and even (gasp) truffle paste.
The nationwide treasure – strukli.
Guidelines are made to be damaged, I assume, and the nice people of Zagreb have but to bear down on La Struk with torches and pitchforks, demanding an finish to such experiments. Nonetheless, I’m wanting ahead to tasting the straightforward conventional model and seeing what all of the fuss is about.
Extra of that later. Whereas strukli is likely one of the excessive factors of the Zagreb meals tour often led by Karlovic, I’ve found rather more about Zagreb’s delicacies than simply this baked tacky icon.
“We welcome outdoors influences however adapt them to our native elements,” she mentioned as we started the tour at Quahwah, specialist espresso roasters who end up an incredible Turkish-style brew. Although Croatia was lengthy a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and thus within the orbit of Viennese espresso homes, this model of espresso earlier drifted throughout the border from the Ottoman Empire.
Then it’s off into a beautiful Nineteenth-century atrium recognized on the Oktogon to study Croatian cheeses at Gligora. This family-owned enterprise sells cheese produced on the island of Pag, the place a salty sea mist imbues the sage eaten by the sheep, flavouring their milk and the ensuing cheese. We style this, together with a number of cow’s cheeses, and so they’re all flavoursome and distinctive.
A go to to the Dolac market is one other excessive level. Opened within the centre of Zagreb in 1930, it has each an indoor part for deli meals and an out of doors space promoting recent fruit and greens. There’s an added curiosity to the objects Karlovic factors to as we stroll previous its stalls – together with mlinci, lasagne-like sheets comprised of flour, water and eggs – as we’ll be consuming a few of them later for lunch at Stari Fijaker, a traditional outdated restaurant with bowtie-wearing waiters.