♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - You know, I love Romania.

I was there for the first time in 1971, when it was still behind the Iron Curtain.

I was followed around by plainclothes police of some kind.

It was quite an experience.

I just went back; it's very different.

Yes, there's still some Soviet-era buildings, but the downtown is beautiful, historical, lots of great food, people in the streets.

Now, Irina Georgescu, who wrote the book Danube, was my guide.

We drove about six hours north of Bucharest, which is in the south.

You go through the Carpathian Mountains, which are super wild and crazy, and you get to Transylvania.

Now, what I love about Transylvania is people grow a lot of their own food.

They have root cellars.

And, so one of the first things we did was make ciorba.

This is kind of the national dish.

It's a soup that has a little fermented liquid added at the end called bors-- B-O-R-S.

You can use vinegar.

We did a meatball ciorba, which is my favorite variation.

Next-- you know, there's a lot of cornmeal in Romania, and so we did a polenta cheese casserole.

Super light and creamy, absolutely delicious.

And finally, we did the Romanian version of moussaka, which has a spicy pork sauce with potatoes.

So, please stay tuned as we explore the fabulous cooking of Romania.

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♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - Eating at the Romanian table, it's a bit like reading a history book.

- (speaking Romanian): - A little bit German, a bit Saxon, a bit of Hungarian, Armenian, Jewish, Greek, all these come together to form Romanian cuisine.

- Which makes us... I think, unique.

- (laughs) (voiceover): During the Communist regime, I think we lost a lot of the cooking tradition; making cheese, making charcuterie.

We were not allowed to be different.

- Yes!

(claps) So we had to reinvent the traditional recipes with fewer and fewer ingredients.

I was studying a cookbook.

In the first edition, one recipe of soup started with "you need a whole ham," and in the next one was half of chicken.

And in the third one in the late '70s was like some chicken bones.

For the same recipe.

- And there wasn't much in the shops.

We ate what we preserved during the more abundant months.

- To Romania, all the fermented thing, it's like a religion.

(train passing by) - Bucharest is this fantastic city that brings together the story of Romanian cuisine.

- There are so many young chefs in Romania reinventing the traditional recipes.

Real taste.

I'm very happy that I live and cook in this period of new Romania.

- And we see this when we talk to Adrian and Gabriel at Bucataria Local Food in Bucharest.

They actually put on the menu an old recipe from Romanian musaca.

- It's a traditional thing.

My grandmother made this, my grand-grandmother made this.

It's a simple dish, a comfort food.

- Greek moussaka is made with aubergines, but in Romania, we make it with potatoes, which gives the layers a more firm texture.

We traditionally use minced pork, which is more full of flavor than the beef.

♪ ♪ We put the layer of potatoes, a layer of meat, another layer of potatoes.

- And on top, the sour cream, eggs... also horezu cheese, and a little smoked paprika.

♪ ♪ This is our musaca with pork and sour cream.

♪ ♪ - In less than three hours, you leave the Parisian-style streets of Bucharest and immerse yourself in this picture-perfect scenery of Transylvania.

♪ ♪ - (speaking Romanian): - (speaking Romanian, via speaker): - I suppose we were rabbits in another life, because we love to eat cabbage.

- A lot of people move to Transylvania nowadays.

There is this search for something meaningful in your life, but in the countryside.

- I never thought I would work so much.

(laughs) It's a lot of work, but it's good work.

- (speaking Romanian): - I often say that if there is no cornmeal, there is no meal in Romania.

We use polenta for everything.

It's like spending a day in the sunshine.

What Rozi makes for us is called bulz.

- (speaking Romanian): - There is this joke that Italians actually invented the idea that you need to stir in the polenta all the time just to get rid of their mother-in-law, to say, "just go there and stir in the polenta."

(laughs) It's actually not true, because you can turn the heat to very low and cover the pot and just allow the maize to absorb the liquid.

- (speaking Romanian): - Usually, bulz is made by the shepherds in the mountains where they mix the polenta with a, a lot of cheese.

They make right there at the hearth, and then they put the stuffed polenta on the grill.

- (speaking Romanian): - It's fantastic on its own, because I absolutely love the molten cheese oozing from the layers of cornmeal.

It's comfort food at every level.

There is this longing for home-cooked cuisine.

Perhaps we forgot about it, but we want to go back to that.

- (speaking Romanian): - Ciorba is an entire category of dishes.

A ciorba that uses fermented wheat is called bors.

We ferment wheat bran and we use that to add to soups.

It gives that really wonderful acidity, but it's not an aggressive acidity.

- (speaking Romanian): (laughing): (group speaking indistinctly) - We're actually rediscovering a very beautiful past, and I think that's a really wonderful thing to see.

♪ ♪ - So, for your next trip, cancel the Sicilian one-week adventure.

You should go to Romania, specifically Transylvania, which looks like, believe it or not, Vermont.

Of course, I think everything looks like Vermont.

So I went to Anca Vlad's house.

She has something called Gastro Local, where she feeds people who come in.

She also gives cooking lessons.

We're going to start now to make a meatball ciorba, which is the one I had at Anca's place that day.

So, we start out with making rice.

Now, she uses, oddly enough, a very short grain rice, Arborio rice.

The reason you use such a short grain rice is you want it to be sticky.

Next up, we do what every soup does, is we start with a little sofrito, a little oil, diced onions, celery, salt and pepper.

Get that up to speed.

We're going to sauté that just to soften it; we're not trying to brown it.

Now... if you're doing parsley or a dill or anything else, one thing you can do is just turn it like this, and that way you can save a lot of time and you get a much finer mince.

And stems, by the way, even with parsley, have a ton of flavor.

Here, I'm going to put this in here.

Now you can tell I'm a chef, because I have a stem of dill in my pocket.

That's good.

So, the dill stems... beef broth.

And water.

And the bay.

So, we'll cook this for about 15 minutes, a nice simmer.

And by the way, in Romania, you don't go into the pantry and get a can of beef broth.

They just might throw some bones or meat in a pan with water and make their own broth, or they have some leftover broth, or they just use water.

So one of the other recipes, another soup I learned, not too far away from this one, was a "nothing soup" or a caraway soup.

And they start with water, right?

This, this recipe starts with a lot of water.

In this case, the caraway soup is three tablespoons of toasted caraway seeds with two quarts of water and that creates a stock.

It's just absolutely amazing.

They add some other things to it, but essentially it's soup from nothing.

So that inventiveness, right?

It's a simple cuisine full of flavor, but everything is right there.

So I, I really fell in love with that countryside.

The people are amazing.

So now we're going to make the meatballs.

start by whisking the egg a little bit.

Meat, onion... Egg, salt and pepper, dill, and sweet paprika.

And I am going to use my hands, because that's the best way to do this.

So the rice kind of acts like a panade, which is bread with either water or milk.

It'll loosen them up, not make them as tough.

So we're going to make, I don't know, 16 or so of these.

You can notice like, when I start making things like this, I start out bigger, then I realize I'm using too much and then they-- the meatballs get smaller and smaller.

Little tomato now.

So the base of the soup has been cooking for about 15 minutes.

Okay, I'm going to turn this down a little bit.

So, we'll simmer these for... 15 minutes or so, we can check them.

One thing about ciorba is it always has fermented liquid at the end.

Now, we can use a little vinegar here.

They use bors.

It's fermented from grains.

It's really interesting.

There's a lot of fermentation in this cuisine.

From the gardens, in order to preserve the produce, they would ferment.

Now, I also had-- at the first restaurant I went to, fabulous chef-- He made a lemonade using this fermented liquid.

It was absolutely fabulous.

Wasn't too sweet, and the fermentation gave it that extra punch.

Again, they built the cuisine around local, around what they grow, around root cellars, around making do with what they have, and that's why the cuisine is so amazing.

This is cider vinegar.

Couple tablespoons.

Grab bay leaves if I can.

Oh, almost had it.

By the way, when a recipe calls for one or two bay leaves, I always double it, because I... swear I can't taste it half the time.

So, I think I got 'em all out.

If not, there's a surprise bay leaf for some lucky diner.

So, we have the minced dill fronds.

I'm gonna put a good chunk of that in now.

I would like to thank my guide, cookbook author Irina Georgescu.

Ah-- oh, here, see!

I'm the lucky diner, I get it.

Great.

(chuckle) She lives in Wales.

She was born in Bucharest, grew up there, has written a number of books about Romania.

I think her latest book is called Danube, which is great.

And she told me about growing up during the communist regime in Romania, which was pretty interesting.

But yeah, I saved this for a reason.

We'll put that right... just stick that in.

There we are.

Hm... okay, we'll lay it down.

There we are, looks nice.

Meatballs are nice and tender.

Mm.

And they're really hot, too.

It's also a really good example of how one ingredient-- in this case, cider vinegar or bors-- completely changes the dish.

So, the lesson, the takeaway for me from this, was before you serve something like a soup, for example, taste it.

You can add a little acid like lemon juice or cider vinegar.

You could add a little garlic or ginger.

You could add some fresh herbs, just at the end, to sort of balance things out to make things, you know, a little more interesting.

Romanian meatball soup is a great master recipe to have at your disposal.

It's simple, it's delicious, and has that little punch at the end.

♪ ♪ - Romanian polenta.

It is a story of death, taxes, and surprise.

During Ottoman rule, many crops were taxed, except for corn.

So, farmers grew corn, and therefore corn-based dishes made their way into what became Romanian cuisine.

For the death, before Romania was a united country, it was ruled as three separate principalities, and there was a lot of war between those principalities, which meant there were a lot of soldiers to feed.

And so farmers were actually paid to grow corn.

As for surprise-- in Romania, polenta is no surprise.

That's for the rest of us.

We associate polenta with Italy, but in fact, polenta is a crucial element of the Romanian diet.

In order to make polenta, you have to start with cornmeal, and there are several types available.

And as the resident cooking teacher, I want to make sure you have the right kind.

So, here we have stone-ground cornmeal and coarse cornmeal, then the instant stuff, and then Italian cornmeal.

For this dish, you want to either use coarse or stone-ground.

You can use instant.

It won't have as nuanced a flavor, but we do include instructions in the recipe for how to use it.

To make the polenta, We're actually using our no-stir polenta recipe where you take a cup and a half of coarse cornmeal... in six and a half cups of water.

All you add to that is two teaspoons of salt.

As it comes up to heat, we're going to vigorously whisk the cornmeal.

What this vigorous whisking does is release starch into the water.

As the water gets hot, that starch gelatinizes and sort of swells up and holds on to the liquid.

So when we pop this in the oven for 45 minutes, it's hands off.

You can even see that the water is getting cloudy.

That's from all the starches in the cornmeal releasing into the water, and then getting filled up with water, becoming these little buoyant, swollen cornmeal granules.

The water is at a nice simmer, so now it goes into the oven, uncovered, at 375 degrees for 45 minutes.

There are many polentas in Transylvania.

We chose this one because it's very cheesy.

We love it.

It has two types of cheeses to approximate the flavors of what you would get there from local cheeses.

We used both mozzarella and provolone.

And you'll see that I'm buttering a baking dish, because we're going to make sort of a polenta-lasagna situation.

So now we're going to take the polenta out of the oven and increase the temperature to 425.

While the polenta is hot, you need to do two things.

You need to add some black pepper and two more tablespoons of butter.

And then you want to assemble the polenta in cheese layers, also while the polenta is hot.

We can see how creamy and lush this is, and we didn't stir it at all once it was in the oven.

Okay, so here's our provolone and mozzarella.

Four ounces of each.

So, we're going to do everything in threes.

We want three layers.

We have about six cups of cooked polenta, so we're going to take two cups and pour it right into the bottom of our buttered pan.

And there's no need to be exact, but you want about... a third of your cheese.

So mozzarella is really fresh and milky, and provolone is a little more aged and salty and nutty.

That combination is wonderful with that corny, bright flavor of polenta.

Now, sour cream.

Why do we add sour cream?

We need acidity, we need brightness, we need tang.

Because polenta and cheese are both rich.

Polenta is sweet and earthy, and cheese is fatty and salty and so having the acidity of the sour cream really helps balance the dish.

And then we're going to finish it off with cheese.

So remember, I increased the temperature to 425 and it's going to go in and bake for 25-ish minutes until the top is all bubbly and brown and you just want to dive in there with a spoon.

In case we had any confusion earlier, we now know this is officially not Italian polenta.

This is its own beautiful thing.

So, look at this cheesy, browned, gorgeous crust.

That mix of cheeses is perfect.

I can taste the nutty provolone, but it's the sour cream that really ties this whole thing together.

I think it actually makes it that I can taste the corn more.

This cheesy polenta is pretty perfect on its own.

However, next, I'm going to teach you how to make a quick pickle that turns this into a whole meal.

If there's one lesson we learned in Transylvania with Irina, it's the power of sour.

So, the culinary reason is that acidic foods lift rich foods, and there's a lot of rich food in Central European cooking.

Irina showed us many of the pickles and ferments in Transylvanian cooking, and I'm going to show you the quickest of them.

So, we have some sliced red onions here, and we're going to make a very simple brine.

We have white vinegar... sugar... and salt.

We don't need to heat it up, we don't need to add spices.

We're just going to mix it all together, and we're just going to pour that right over the red onions.

And then, I like to use clean hands and just sort of massage it in.

And that's all you have to have for a quick pickle.

I'd pack this into a jar and let it sit until I'm ready to cook that night.

A few days up to a week in the fridge, they just get softer and more acidic and a little sweeter with time.

But you can make the same brine-- which I have a double of here-- and basically make a pickled salad.

So, to do that, you just take what vegetables you have.

This is the agricultural reason that pickles exist in Transylvanian cooking.

There are a lot of farms, and there's also a long winter.

You want vegetables in the winter when you're making even richer foods, and so you preserve them.

You might ferment them, you might pickle them, but you want to take everything you're growing in either your back little lot, which is more common now in Transylvania, or your proper farm, and you want to preserve them for winter.

But you just put in whatever colorful, gorgeous things you want to, and then with time, even these sturdy things like celery and carrots will soften because of the acid, salt and sugar.

These ones you want to use within a week or so, and they must be kept in the refrigerator.

But after an hour, two days, three days, they'll have this great acidic flavor.

That's sour power.

So, these pickled red onions or my whole pickled salad, are a great accompaniment to any rich dish, like the cheesy polenta I just made or the musaca that Matt's going to show you in the next segment.

We serve it with cornichon, but why not make a pickled salad and serve it with that?

♪ ♪ - So, Chris came back from Romania with just reams of delicious recipes and this spin on moussaka is absolutely one of my favorites.

Now we may all be familiar with Greek moussaka, which is a spiced beef layered with eggplant.

This flips the script a little bit.

This begins with potatoes.

So we need to parcook our potatoes, and what we're going to do is we're going to slice them and cook them with a little vinegar.

Now, cooking potatoes with vinegar helps set the pectin in the potato slices so they don't turn to mush.

We need to cut these potatoes into eighth-inch-thick slices, which is pretty thin.

What I'm going to do is just shave a very thin strip off the bottom, and this helps it sit flat.

Some sliding, the blades actually sliding off my knuckle, keeping my fingertips back, no chance of cutting.

So we have our potato sliced, and we're going to put them in a pot.

Then we're going to cover those potatoes by about an inch of water.

And while the potatoes are cooking, we're going to go ahead and cook our filling.

Now it's two medium onions, two cloves of minced garlic, and we're gonna add three-quarter teaspoon kosher salt and quarter-teaspoon black pepper.

So when you add salt early on in the cooking process, it starts breaking down the onions or any aromatic you're cooking.

So we're gonna add our one pound of ground pork.

Very lightly browned, and now we're gonna add one 14.5-ounce can of whole tomatoes.

They don't look whole anymore, right?

We puréed them.

And we're going to add my favorite spice here, smoked paprika; it's about a teaspoon and a half.

So that sauce has simmered about ten minutes longer.

And our potatoes are tender.

It smells amazing, right?

You get that smoked paprika, you get the sweet pork.

So we're going to build this in an eight-inch square baking dish, something everybody has, makes it really easy.

So we're going to put a layer of bread crumbs on the bottom, just a very fine layer, and that helps soak up juices.

So we're going to put a layer of potatoes down, shingle them out.

And you know what?

It's okay if it's a little messy.

(laughs) This is the bottom of our casserole.

So we're going to take half of our pork tomato sauce now.

The garlic's coming through now, too.

So, you get the garlic and the smoked paprika.

So that is our first layer.

Now we're going to go ahead and add another layer of potatoes.

Okay, now let's go ahead and put the rest of that sauce in and let's top with our last layer of potatoes.

And now comes the topping.

So, normally with a Greek-style moussaka, you have to make a bechamel, in which you have to make the roux and simmer the sauce and everything.

In this case, it is strictly crème fraîche and eggs whipped together.

It makes this really beautiful topping.

Crème fraîche is the closest thing you can find in the U.S.

to Romanian sour cream, which is thicker, slightly higher fat content.

We're going to add our two eggs in.

And a quarter-teaspoon each, kosher salt and black pepper.

So those eggs add a nice, richer flavor to the crème fraîche, but they also help it set up into a layer that's going to sit on top of those potatoes.

And then we're going to finish it with four ounces of Manchego or a sharp cheddar cheese.

Now, it's the closest thing to approximating the flavor of the Romanian cheese Chris had.

Make sure to bake it on a rimmed baking sheet in case it boils over.

We're going to bake it at 350 degrees for about 40 to 45 minutes.

It'll be bubbling gorgeous by that time.

It's been about 45 minutes.

This comes out of the oven bubbling hot, smells like heaven.

It's cooled for a bit, so let's go ahead and slice a piece.

So, I love this, because the potatoes soak up those flavors from the pork, the tomato sauce.

Dive in for a bite here.

Oh, you get the tang of the cheese, the richness of the pork.

Flavors are really clean.

It's not complicated by too many herbs.

So the purity of the garlic, the smoked paprika, the pork.

Next time Chris goes to Romania, I want to go with him.

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