Demikát. (source: Sme - Jozef Jakubčo)
My first encounter with demikát, a traditional Slovak soup made of bryndza, a salty sheep cheese, was not at a dinner table, but surprisingly at a concert – in the 1980s a group of Slovak progressive rock musicians named themselves after the meal. But while the songs of Marián Greksa & Demikát stirred the then still waters of the Slovak music scene - their hit Amerika, Afrika - Paradajka, Paprika (America, Africa - Tomato, Pepper) is still played on Slovak radio stations today - what I was left with was a desire to taste a soup with such a mysterious name.
This, however, turned out to be an even bigger challenge than catching a sighting of the TV detective Colombo’s wife. Just like everyone talks about her, but no one has seen her, the internet is full of recipes for demikát, but nobody cooks it. And unlike bryndzove halušky, another traditional Slovak dish featuring bryndza, it is missing from the menus of most restaurants in Slovakia.
I wanted to try to cook demikát, but my first challenge was deciding on which was the ‘proper’ version of it. Recipes not only differ in small ways, for instance on whether to serve the finished soup with roasted bread cubs, onion, or ham, but even in the fundamentals of its cooking.
