What to eat in Bucovina: porcini, balmoș, trout and where to find them near Gura Humorului

Food in Bucovina is simple and heavy. Sour cream on everything, polenta next to anything, smoked meat in the attic and mushrooms from the forest. Nobody counts calories here, least of all after a day on the trail. Below is what to try, what to buy and what to cook yourself in the villa kitchen.

Eight dishes to order

Hribi cu smântână. Hribi are porcini, the big brown capped mushrooms locals pick in the spruce forests from August to October. They are cooked with onion, sour cream and dill and served over polenta. If you see this on a menu in season, order it.

Balmoș. Polenta cooked in sour cream and butter instead of water, with burduf cheese melted into it. It is the shepherds' dish of the Obcine hills and richer than it sounds. One portion feeds two.

Bulz. Balls of polenta stuffed with burduf cheese, baked over embers or in the oven. Served with a fried egg and sour cream, or next to grilled pastrami. It works well on the courtyard barbecue, we can show you how.

Tochitură bucovineană. Chunks of pork, sausage and sometimes liver, fried in lard with garlic, served with polenta, cheese and an egg. The recipe here has no tomato sauce, unlike the southern version.

Trout. From the trout farms on the Humor valley and at Ciocănești. Grilled with garlic sauce, or smoked over fir branches the way they do it in Ciocănești. Their trout festival is held every year around 15 August.

Ciorbă rădăuțeană. Chicken soup with sour cream, garlic and vinegar, invented in Rădăuți a few decades ago and adopted by the whole of Bucovina. It is the soup everyone orders, and nobody regrets it.

Poale-n brâu pastries. Leavened dough folded over sweet cheese with raisins or salty cheese with dill. You find them warm at the town bakeries in the morning.

Papanași. Fried cottage cheese doughnuts with sour cream and blueberry or sour cherry jam. The standard dessert, but here the blueberries come from the Obcine hills.

Where to eat in Gura Humorului

The town is 5 minutes from the villas and has several restaurants with Bucovina cooking, in the centre and on the road to Voroneț. We don't give a fixed list, because it changes from year to year. At check-in we tell you where we have eaten well in the past month and book you a table if you like. One general rule: pick the places with a short menu. Whoever makes 15 Bucovina dishes makes them all well. Whoever makes 80 does not.

What to buy at the market

The Gura Humorului food market is in Piața Republicii, in the centre, open daily from the morning. Saturday is the best day, when producers come in from the surrounding villages. What we buy there:

• Burduf cheese, kneaded sheep's cheese kept in fir bark or in a sheepskin. Ask to taste first, the saltiness varies from one producer to the next.
• Urdă and fresh caș, whey cheese and young cheese, for breakfast with tomatoes and spring onions.
• Homemade sour cream, thick, sold in jars. Nothing like the supermarket kind.
• Smoked sausages and bacon, from village smokehouses. Good on the courtyard barbecue.
• Fir and raspberry honey, from beekeepers in the Obcine hills.
• Blueberry jam and fir syrup, homemade.
• Porcini, fresh in autumn and dried on a string all year round.

Cooking at the villa

Each villa has a full kitchen, with a hob, oven, large fridge and cookware for 10. In the courtyard is the barbecue, with the heated gazebo next to it. Groups staying a week usually end up cooking at home at least half the evenings, because it is easier and because it turns out well.

Three simple ideas with what you find at the market:

1. Polenta with cheese and sour cream, the easiest dinner in the world. Cornmeal, water, salt. Boil for 20 minutes, turn out onto a wooden board and cut with a thread.
2. Bulz on the barbecue. Make the polenta the evening before, let it set, form balls with burduf cheese in the middle and put them on the embers in foil or straight on the grill.
3. Trout in foil. Trout from the farm, salt, lemon, a clove of garlic and dill, 15 minutes over the embers.

If you like, we bring wood and charcoal in the morning and leave you a list of what is in season that week.

Drinks

Bucovina is not wine country. People here drink afinată, a sweet homemade blueberry liqueur, and horincă, plum or pear brandy of 50 degrees and up. Both are sold at the market in unlabelled bottles. At a restaurant, ask for a glass of afinată with dessert.

Fir tea, made from young shoots, is the winter drink of local homes. Fir syrup is sold at the same market stalls, by the jar.