Asparagus farm in Hostin u Vojkovic

The asparagus season just started! Back in the days of the First Republic, Czechoslovakia was renowned for its asparagus, which it exported all over Europe. Unfortunately, over the years this fame faded and almost no asparagus is grown here anymore. Almost! I’ve numerously heard and read about a big asparagus farm near Mělnik, but never got around to actually visiting it. I needed to think about something else after weeks of studying and most importantly after a heartbreaking parting with someone we deeply loved. Yep, April was sad time for us. So I asked husband if he couldn’t take me to this farm to look around and buy some asparagus.

The village where the farm is located is not far away from Prague, just a 15 minute drive away from Letňany. The typical asparagus fields, covered with black plastic foil, were a clear sign that we were there. We drove into the agricultural complex on the other side of the road, parked our car and started wandering around in search for people. There was no one there.

We finally found a small sign on a building saying Bohaemer Spargel Kultur, which also said that the office is on the second floor. We walked up the stairs and knocked on the door. A gentleman opened up and we asked him about the asparagus. He replied that he doesn’t speak Czech…:-) It's an advantage that I speak German, because he neither spoke any English. He said that there was no problem with buying asparagus and that we had to follow him with our car. We drove through the somewhat rundown and abandoned, but considerably big complex and finally the man wandered into a big hall. We parked and walked inside too.

What was inside was rather surprising…there was one tiny automatic sorting link in the big hall, operated by four Asian gentlemen. They were washing and sorting out the asparagus and putting it in boxes. There was another gentleman who approached us and asked what we wanted. We said “Asparagus!”. He inquired how much we wanted, what quality and whether we had something to put it in. We handed him a plastic bag. Yeah, I know we should have taken a basket with us, and requested 1 kilogram of first quality. He put some asparagus stalks into our bag, put it on the scale and asked us for 100 crowns. I was actually afraid that they would not sell us any because we only wanted so little, but there was absolutely no problem. We paid and left :-)
There wasn’t one single Czech person we met, the men we spoke to were probably Dutch, not German for sure, and there were 2 cars with Dutch signs parking outside.

Now, to the actual asparagus. I’m not really a big expert but IMHO this asparagus is way better than anything you could find in town. It’s plump, firm and it really cannot get any fresher than that. It virtually came from the field.

The ends where it has been cut off were oozing with the "juice", they just had no time to dry out. This is clearly the best and freshest asparagus I have ever encountered here and I hope it will taste good too! And most importantly it’s local!

I’ve been to Makro last week and the asparagus sold there came from Chile, it was soft and dry at the ends and cost 90kc for 500gr. These beautiful white stalks above cost only 100kc for a kilogram! Second quality would have been even cheaper.

It's a great pity that asparagus is nost so popular here yet. Back in the days when we lived in Munich there was an asparagus craze every year during its season. Everybody had to go out and eat asparagus with sauce Hollandaise, or asparagus with new potatoes and ham and cook asparagus at home. Germans eat lots of asparagus and during asparagus season the shops are full with gadgets for cooking and serving it. Hopefully this tradition will migrate here, because it's a very healthy, tasty and not difficult to cook delicacy.

*The Boheamer Spargel Kultur farm is located in a village called Hostin u Vojkovic. If you are driving from the direction of Vojkovice you have to cross the whole village, the farm is on the outscirts. There is no information about the farm on the net, or at least I haven't found any. There is no sign indicating that it's located there on the road or in the village. It has been mentioned many times in different magazines, but I felt that no one from the magazines actually got around to visiting it because they supplied very scarce and similar information. Only white asparagus is sold there and there is nothing like a shop or anything. It's a fairly big complex of old agricultural buildings, that are not used. I think that it's best to go there in the morning or early afternoon. When you come there you'll see a long white building on the left side, the office entrance is on the side facing the road. If there's no one there, try to walk deeper into the premises and peek inside the halls, maybe you'll find someone ;-)

Letenská husa, Hvězda and Lokal

St Martin’s wine is available from 11 November, but we didn’t have the time to go out for dinner or wine tasting somewhere. We took advantage of a Sunday off.
This St Martin's wine trend trend that came out from nowhere is amazing. Following the tradition of Beaujolais Nouveau Czech wine makers decided to give it a go and make this into a full scale wine festival. Restaurants caught on quick, more and more of them offering goose specialties and St. Martin’s wine. It’s a marketing trick from A to Z but it works well.
But why are geese eaten during St Martin’s day? My Culinaria Germany book says that geese gave out St Martin’s hiding place by squeaking and so during this saint’s day geese’s necks were wringed and the geese eaten. A bloody habit…
Not having eaten any goose during the St Martin’s festival we decided to check out the Letenská husa in the agricultural museum. It’s a small presentation of young St. Martin’s wines and some thematic food.

Unfortunately, there was no goose! Only duck, and it wasn’t particularly cheap. I thought that 160czk for a leg of duck was quite a lot, regarding the fact that there was no seating and the food was served on plastic plates. We decided that it was not worth the money. It always amazes me how inflexible some vendors are, they sell klobasa for 40czk or duck legs for 160czk. Why not sell duck paté or picked duck meat in sandwiches etc.??? But it's always either the cheap stuff or the expensive stuff, nothing in between. 160czk is simply way too much money to spend on stánek food and I don’t think I saw anyone actually buying or eating the duck.

We turned our attention towards the stall with ostrich meat.

This is an ostrich steak. I never had ostrich before and thought it was interesting. The meat was juicy although too salty, it had this slight metal flavor (like blood) and tasted like something between beef, pork and lamb. I didn’t think it was well prepared but if it’s cooked and seasoned properly it might be a delicacy. This piece cost around 80czk which is fine but, I found it appalling that they charged 5czk for every serving of ketchup, mustard and bread. They’re incredible, these people! When will they learn?? I've been charged 5, 10 and even 45czk for single serve ketchup packets, but never for ketchup and mustard out of 10 litre plastic containers. OMG
We bought some Černá hora beer for my dad in law, he collects beer stickers, his collection holds more than 3000 pieces now. We bought just one bottle of rosé wine, we’re not into St Martin’s wine. It's all about the hype, not about the wine.

We also had a potato pancake with garlic and smoked pork. The pancakes were prepared in advance. Upon order the lady and her little helper put some minced garlic and smoked meat inside the pancake, folded it and grilled it on the griddle with some lard. It was tasty! The pork lard on the pic below is ours. Pork lard with škvarky is one of my many guilty pleasures, it's simple irresistable on a piece of warm dark bread.

Some koláčky. We had quite a few and they were delicious.

We had a nice walk in Hvězda park afterwards.

And then we headed to Lokal. I will not go into much detail about this place, it has been discussed by many before. It’s a spectacular place, I never thought that Dahab (the restaurant that occupied this space before) was that big. It’s HUGE. Even if all the tables would have been occupied it still would feel kinda empty. It was fairly dark inside, not good for photos.
I had boiled beef with horseradish sauce and bread dumplings. I now know that I’m no horseradish sauce fan :) IMHO the horseradish flavor is very weak and the sauce is floury, milky and bland. I’ve tried horseradish omáčka for a couple of times before and it’s probably just not my thing, because the people sitting at the table next to us said that the sauce was finger-licking good and better than their grandmother's. The beef was cooked perfectly and the dumplings were some of the best I had.

Husband’s fried cheese with tar tar sauce was very good. Wow, husband had a vegetarian dinner ;-) It was not greasy at all. He ordered a cucumber salad to go with it, it was a classic Czech style grated cucumber salad with a sweet and sour dressing, very refreshing.

The beer is exceptional here, one of the best in Prague. I really liked how stylish the place is. The curtains, the wall painting (I mean the green flowers) and other stuff, it all looks like the hospoda in the village where our weekend house is :)

We will be going back for sure to sample more items and to have some more of that great beer. I can’t wait to try the Svíčkova in Lokal. Service was exeptionally good. The barman (or rather the beerman) eagerly answered our questions about the beer system inhouse and he even admitted that the spectacular cooling spirals served a mere decorational purpose. The other staff was very friendly and helpful too.

Big thumbs up for Lokal!

Výlov rybníku Dvořiště - the gastronomic part

There were all sorts of things being sold.

Hungarian sausages, salami and spices. Where is the goose liver??

Home made Slivovice (husband and mom were very happy about that) and surprisingly good homemade pickles and local vegetables.

The pickled cucmber (kvašáky) were a major discovery for me. They did not contain any vinegar and tasted just like they do in Russia and Ukraine, salty instead of sweet and sour.

One of the biggest stalls. There is carp goulash bubbling away in the huge pot.

Grilled trout.

The food was carp, carp, carp!

Many people’s prejudice against fresh water fish is closely related to carp’s muddy flavor. Amur or tolstolobik do not have this muddy flavor and are healthier and cheaper than carp, but for some reason they are mostly ignored by the public. In the end it’s always the cook who makes the difference, cooking fresh water fish simply requires more effort than your average salmon, but it’s good nonetheless and most importantly it’s local!

Here we have the famous carp fries from the famous Šupina restaurant. Crispy, greasy and filling, the ultimate fastfood.

Carp steak with horseradish sauce (Petr Stupka stall). Delicious! It was coated with crispy polenta and was well seasoned, juicy and most importantly boneless!

Carp bifteček (Petr Stupka stall)

Carp potatoe cake (Petr Stupka stall)

Petr Stupka is a fairly famous Czech chef, well mostly TV chef. He apparently cooperates closely with Třebonský Kapr , the biggest fish farmer producer in the country. He is a nice person to chat with, he loves his job and is a good source of information on freshwater fish. Here, he cooked the 3 dishes pictured above. The last 2 were prepared with an interesting innovation Třebonský Kapr came up with. I had mixed feelings about it, until the first time I tried it at the Ryby a Víno festival in Prachatice about a month ago.

The Kapří product has been promoted by Třebonský Kapr for a couple of years. It’s basically a frozen, raw carp sausage with oatmeal. What you do is cut off a piece, unfreeze it and use as you would use other mince.

For some inexplicable reason this stuff cannot be bought anywhere, they only offer it for wholesale traders. The carp bifteček constits of this carp mince, spinach and cheese. This isn’t gourmet food, but it’s quite palatable! It’s also cheap and I would personally prefer this to the notorious frozen pangasius (basa) sold everywhere.

We had much more food, but I thought that only these two stalls stood out. The rest of the food was greasy and not very well made. The stalls looked as though they transformed from grilling sausages just for this one weekend and therefore the fish was cooked just like sausages - for a long time on a greasy grill. The Šupina stall had a nice and talkactive lady serving the food but no cook in sight, the food was brought in from somewhere else. Petr Stupka was the only real chef there...the only person who put at least some effort into cooking good and most importantly different food. All of the time we have been there he has been communicating with people, explaining what he was doing, answering any (sometimes very stupid) questions.

BTW here is the catfish we bought. It was surprisingly good just simply seasoned with salt and pepper and grilled!

Výlov rybníku Dvořiště - the technical part

I had hard time deciding how I should name this post because until this weekend I had no idea of anything like that existing. Well, I actually heard and read about the famous pond haulings in Southern Bohemia, but I never thought about the English name for this process. I don’t even know whether the whole process is actually called hauling, so let me call it the more common Czech name - výlov rybníku.

Many people mentioned to me that they made their ways to the ponds upon sunrise. We are way too lazy to do that. We woke up at about 9, had a peaceful breakfast and drove to the pond. It’s only 70km away from our weekend house but the roads are peripheral and so it took us more than an hour to get there, we arrived at about 11:30. We parked our car and walked towards the pond. We were really quite amazed to see that the pond was HUGE, it doesn’t do it right to call it a pond actually, it’s a proper lake.

The fishermen start at 6 in the morning and work until 3 p.m., for 4 days in a row. It’s a tough job for tough guys. They all drink slivovice in the process but still it must be very exhausting to stand in this freezing water, sorting tons and tons of fish.

What they do is throw out the nets, haul them to the banks and then by hand they pick up the fish from the water into buckets. Their colleagues then sort out the fish into different containers. Most of the fish goes into trucks and is driven away, but some of it is sold on the spot. More on that later.

At 2 p.m. the amount of people attending dropped significantly and we decided to go too. It was very cold that day and we were freezing by then. Of course we couldn’t leave without buying some fish. We bought a 5kg catfish. There was a huge variety of live fish on sale. I thought that it‘s somewhat depressing that in a country with such vast ponds and lakes all we get to buy in supermarkets is local trout and carp. Even in Makro the selection of fresh water fish is small. One of the carps in the box weighed 6kg!!!

I enjoyed our trip immensely! Next year I hope to go see the same thing happening at the Rožmberk pond/lake, which is the biggest in the country.

The next post will feature food!

TTTM SAPA - the Vietnamese market

There is no other place like this in Prague. In fact, there are one or two similar but smaller markets, but they can’t compare to TTTM SAPA. It’s a small world of its own and is the center of the Vietnamese community in Prague and maybe even in the whole country. It's like a small town, it has language schools, a kindergarden, a buddhist temple, hairdresser and beauty salons, casinos, grocery stores, restaurants etc. People working in Sapa are generally very friendly but speak very little Czech. The place itself is actually a wholesale market with clothes, household items, electronics and other stuff found in many smaller Vietnamese markets and shops. But all of this was of no interest to us because we were there for the food! There are many small vendors selling just one particular food and also places serving the more traditional Čínské bistro fare.

The grocery stores in Sapa sell exotic fruits and vegetables (even stinky durian!!!), live fish, seafood and meat. There are also many ready made foods sold, like whole grilled ducks, banh mi sandwiches, different sweets, fresh juices etc etc.

On our first visit we tried the Bun cha at an eatery called Hai Ha. It’s a small joint where 1 guy is grilling, 1 guy is chopping and marinating the meat, 1 guy washing and chopping the herbs and vegetables and 2 women are assembling the plates and waiting the tables. The meat is being grilled outside of the restaurant in a small adjacent side-street. The meat is marinated in a sweet marinade and so it burns ferociously on the grill, due to this the guy operating the big grill is constantly wearing a mask. A somewhat bizarre sight. The place itself has 2 big and 4 small tables. What you do is come in, sit down and wait.

One of the ladies will either come and ask you something or she will start bringing the food straight away. We were approached by one of the ladies, but didn’t understand a word she said and so I just made the victory gestrure with my fingers to indicate that we want two portions. She nodded and walked away. In about 2 minutes we were brought a dish of greens, a dish of noodles and a bowl of sweet and sour dressing/soup each. A couple of minutes we got our two plates of meat.
This is how it looks altogether.

Perfectly grilled thin morsels of delicious meat and tiny thin “hamburgers”, they are meant to be dipped into the bowl with the sweet and sour dressing and eaten with the provided greens. The noodles are aslo meant to be eaten with the dressing. These herbs are not sold in regular supermarkets or groceries, apart form cilantro and iceberg lettuce they are authentic Vietnamese herbs and their names remain unknown to me (Ngo gai perhaps?). The combination of the four elements contributes to the complex experience from this dish. The meat is tasty on its own, but together with the herbs, noodles and dressing it is a major delicacy. It costs 90 crowns each I believe.
After finishing off our Bun cha we wandered around the market and came across a vendor frying something closely resembling doughnuts. We bought to kinds of doughnuts and a mysterious

square parcel wrapped in a leaf (banana??).

The doughnuts are…uhm….unusual :-) They were extremely greasy, oil was dripping when I bit into one of them. They had thick and hard crusts inside which was some gooey substance. The most interesting thing was that they were not sweet at all! The one dusted with powdered sugar was sweet because of the sugar, but the filling and the other doughnut were not even close to being sweet. Oh well, I never was a connoisseur of Asian desserts and I guess it will stay the same :-)
The leaf wrapped parcel was another surprise! We unwrapped it when we got home and it contained a square made of sticky rice with some pastelike yellowish-grey filling. It was

something like this. Interesting, but not something I would buy again.

We visited the market again this weekend. This time a couple of friends joined us. We wandered around the market a bit and sat down in a place serving Pho.

It was very good, but I thought that the Pho soup served in the Holešovice tržnice is richer and has deeper flavours. Here is a picture of some delicious noodles I had in the Holešovice tržnice recently, these are actually also called Pho (Pho xào) but are not served as a soup.

Pho is probably the most famous Vietnamese dish. I am obviously not the only one who wonders how it is possible that there are no Pho restaurants all around Czech Republic, with so many Vietnamese people living here. For some inexplicable reason they resort to operating Chinese bistros with food of questionable quality. Vietnamese food is much healthier and tastier than sladko-kyselé kuře! You can get Pho at several places in Prague though, Sapa market being one with the best variety.
For more information on Sapa, check out Pan Cuketka’s wonderful report and a map worked out by his readers, it’s very helpful! Pan Cuketka also wrote 2 extensive articles on Pho and bun cha in Prague, here is one and the other.

A weekend in Southern Bohemia – Part II

On Saturday we were after a more cultivated experience so we chose to visit Hluboká nad Vltavou. We were surprised to find out that there is a beautiful big lake near Hluboka, as well as a new zoo and a golf course. The lake is suitable for swimming and is lined with camping lots and small cabins.

The town itself looks “new”, I guess the municipality has a considerably high income from all the tourists. This allows them to keep the town center renovated, making it very picturesque. There were hoards of people wandering around and when we reached the main square we understood why. There was an annual wine festival being held this weekend. The main square was lined with small stalls offering wine, food and souvenirs and there were also folk concert on a big stage in the center of the square.

We decided to check out the castle first and have a close look at the stuff offered at the festival later. The castle is beautiful and everyone visiting the area should see it, at least from outside.

We wanted to see the interior of the castle, but because there were so many people around, there was a 3 hour wait for a tour and we didn’t want to wait that long. So, we just wandered around the castle and park for an hour or so.

The gates of the main entrance to the castle are decorated with a metal crow poking out the eyes of a guy that looks suspiciously like a cossack. Typical cossack styling! I mean the moustache and hairstyle.

We saw a wedding photo session taking place inside the castle. See the bride inside the glass winter garden?? The place is perfect for weddings, it's very romantic! But there is an absolute lack of privacy there, tourists are everywhere.

The wine attracted many people. There was a wine tasting inside one of the buildings on the main square but also there were many outside stalls offering wine and most importantly this year's Burčák.

Husband was driving so he didn’t have any but I drank a couple of glasses. We also tried something that I wanted to try for a long time – Kapří hranolky or Carp fries! It’s a dish that was apparently invented in the famous Šupina restaurant in Třebon. It’s basically boneless carp marinated with some spices and deep fried. It is very greasy but surprisingly tasty! I have never tried the original version though. This portion with a slice of bread cost 60 crowns and there is lots of carp for that price., it's very filling.

The same stall also sold different kinds of smoked fish, we bought some too.

There were also different sausages, trdelnik, pancakes, potatoe pancakes and other traditional festival and fair food. We might be returning next year!