Last Afternoon in Bulgaria

7/27

This afternoon I did a SAS-organized cooking class. It was amazing. Bulgarian food is delicious, it’s actually a lot like Greek food with a little Turkish influence and their own flair.

Originally, this trip was supposed to take place in a restaurant in a small village. But, a few months before we arrived, the entire restaurant burned down. The person who told me this probably wasn’t supposed to (he was a new tour guide) and didn’t really tell me anything else about it. So, our cooking class did not happen in the restaurant of a small village, but in the banquet hall of a super nice hotel in Golden Sands (one of Bulgaria’s major beach tourist destinations about half an hour north from Varna along the coast) called Riviera.

We walked into the banquet hall, and it was huge and beautiful and very well air conditioned, which felt amazing. Bulgaria wasn’t as warm as Italy, Croatia and Greece, but it was still toasty enough to make me very thankful for the AC. All the tables were set up with long white tablecloths, red runners, white plates, full sets of silverware and folded white cloth napkins. The ceilings were very high, at least two stories, and the room had sleek, modern architecture with decoration to match and lots of potted plants around the edges of the room.
There were four different stations: one with breads, one with cold dishes, one with main dishes, and one with soups. First, we were at the breads station. We began by making banitza, a mixture of yogurt and eggs layered in filo dough and baked into a kind of custard that is eaten for breakfast. We also made two other types of breads, which both had yogurt as a main ingredient. Last, we made Bulgarian doughnuts, which were meant to be eaten for breakfast and tasted somewhere between doughnuts and beignets. Next was the main dish station (our group rotated a little out of order).  We made moussaka, which was similar to the Greek but slightly lighter and with different seasoning, and pickled cabbage leaves stuffed with a mixture of veal and pork. At the cold dishes station, we made the Bulgarian version of the Greek salad: Shopska salad, kyopoolou (a dip with eggplant, roasted red peppers, tomatoes and spices), roasted pepper salad, and roasted red peppers stuffed with a cheese and herb mixture, dipped in flour, then egg, then breadcrumbs and then fried (yum). The next and final station was the soups. We made a very traditional cold yogurt soup: pretty much just Bulgarian yogurt, water, herbs and cut up cucumbers. We also made a delicious bean soup and a soup with mini meatballs.

After we saw all the cooking demonstrations (because they were more demonstrations that actual classes, we each did a little part of the cooking, but it was main the chef there doing so), we got to eat everything we made. Everything was delicious, and yogurt was served as a general condiment to be eaten on anything.

They also gave us packets of four different spices frequently used in Bulgarian cooking: spearmint, “table savory seasoning,” “flavor salty spice mix” (which had paprika and a number of other spices in it and was delicious…I’m planning on eating it on toast with a little butter), and  “summer savory”, a much-used herb somewhere between oregano and thyme. And, each of us received a little cookbook full of Bulgarian food, including all the foods we made that day.

Our tour guide told us one the way back to the ship that several Bulgarian students in Varna had called her asking to meet the American students who came on the ship. It felt like all of Varna knew what our ship was: everyone I talked to that spoke even a little bit of English asked if I was from the student ship once they found out that I was an American. But once I heard this, I really wished SAS had organized some kind of meet and greet with the Bulgarian students; it would have been so interesting to hear what life in Bulgaria was like from someone in my situation. Two students from Varna actually came along on the trip with us. One, Yuri, sat with us at our table for lunch and told us about the studying he was doing. As a history major, he told us a little about how the communist period actually shaped the food they ate: many of the more involved and “unnecessary” dishes of older traditional Bulgarian cooking fell out of use. So, some of the “traditional” Bulgarian food now had actually not been around that long, but has become very popular and just as Bulgarian fairly recently.

Love from Bulgaria,
Ginny