The Polish recipe to cure hangovers: Żurek

Polish żurek.

We allready gave you some tips and tricks to get rid of your hangover. But every country has its own traditional dishes to make the proces go faster. We like to give you a taste of the international anti-hangover cuisine. In this episode a Polish dish: żurek.

Like many countries in Central and Eastern Europe Poland has a great drinking culture. And solid drinkers need solid food. The most common cure for the hangover is called żurek. A sour rye soup with sausage, potatoes and vegetables. Extra advantage is that you can prepare it before drinking and warmed up the next day it’s still very tasty.
The preparation starts four or five days before you start cooking. Mix three or four cups of rye meal with two cups of lukewarm water in a jar. Cover the jar up with a towel or something and leave it for four or five days to create ‘rye meal sour’. In the end there should be at least two cups of rye meal sour left. This is the base for żurek. For 6 portions use the following other ingredients:

250 gr. Soup vegetables
6 cups of water
250 gr. Polish Kielbasa biala (white sausage)
500 gr. Potatoes (peeled and cut)
Stock
Mix of 1 spoon of flour and 4 spoons of water
1 crushed garlic clove mixed with salt
3 hard boiled eggs

Boil the vegetables in water with the whole sausage. When boiling remove the sausage, cut it into pieces and set it aside.
Add stock to the soup and than the potatoes and rye meal sour. Let it boil till the potatoes are ‘al dente’. Add the slices of sausage, the mix of flour and water and the mix of garlic and salt. Leave the pan on the fire till the potatoes are tender. Add the eggs when serving the soup.
Instead of sausage you can also use another kind of meat like bacon.

Micky Bumbar

Check out more tasty hangover cures from around the world