🇧🇬 The cattle breeds of Bulgaria

Bulgarian cattle are kept above all for their milk, which feeds a dairy table of sour-milk yogurt, salty white sirene cheese and hard kashkaval. Meat is secondary: veal goes on the grill as meze, and beef finds its way into cured sausages. Within Bulgaria's cooking, which leans on vegetables, stews and grills, cattle play a modest but lasting part.

• Most cattle in Bulgaria are kept for milk rather than meat.
• Kashkaval Vitosha is a cow's-milk cheese; kashkaval Balkan uses ewe's milk.
• Bulgarian yogurt is set with a bacterium named Lactobacillus bulgaricus.
• Veal is a popular meat for grilling as meze starters.
• Lukanka, a local salami, is made of minced beef and pork.

Cattle in Bulgaria

Cattle keep a quieter place at Bulgaria's table than pigs, sheep or poultry. The country's cooking leans on vegetables, herbs and fruit, on water-based stews, on grills and on layered pastries, and much of it is shared with Turkish and Greek neighbours through an Ottoman legacy. Where cattle do appear, they do so mostly as milk animals: most are raised for milk rather than meat, and dairy products are among the things Bulgarian food is best known for. Yogurt, known locally as kiselo mlyako, sour milk, is eaten in larger amounts per person than in the rest of Europe, and the white brine cheese sirene turns up in salads and pastries across the country. Veal is the main cattle meat on the grill, served as meze appetizers.

Milk, butter and beef

Milk shapes the national table. Fresh or fermented, it becomes kiselo mlyako, the thick sour milk the world calls Bulgarian yogurt, set with a local bacterium, Lactobacillus bulgaricus, that lends a distinct flavour. Sirene, a soft salty white cheese kept in salty brine, goes into salads and pastries, while kashkaval, a hard yellow cheese, comes in a cow's-milk version called Vitosha and a ewe's-milk one called Balkan. Smetana (sour cream), izvara (a soft quark-style cheese) and katak (a fermented curd) round out the dairy shelf, and ayran, a cold yogurt drink, and matenitsa, buttermilk, wash food down. From the meat side come lukanka, a salami of minced beef and pork, and pastarma, a spiced dried beef sausage kin to Anatolian pastirma.

Today

Dairy still anchors Bulgarian eating. Per person, Bulgarians traditionally eat more yogurt than other Europeans, a habit shared across the Balkans, and the bacterium that sets their sour milk carries the country's name: Lactobacillus bulgaricus. It gives the local cheeses and fermented foods their particular taste, and Bulgaria is known as its historical namesake.