Hrušovský lepník

Appearance & taste

The flatbread is round or folded in half, 25 to 35 cm in diameter and baked golden yellow; afterwards the dough is at least 0.5 cm thick. It is soft, compact and supple with a fine texture, moist and not dry. The smell delicately recalls yeast dough, wood and ash and is slightly smoky. In the taste the ingredients blend during baking; the rest is determined by the filling or topping.

There are four varieties: a savoury one with garlic, a sweet one with plum or cherry jam, one with sauerkraut and one with quark and potatoes, sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, vanilla sugar, vanillin sugar or cinnamon sugar.

Production

For the dough, about 100 g of mashed boiled potatoes go to 1 kg of wheat, rye or spelt flour, together with salt and yeast, which is started with lukewarm water, milk and sugar. The garlic filling consists of pressed garlic, salt and water. For the sauerkraut filling, sauerkraut, onion, sugar, salt, black pepper, oil or animal fat, and pork cracklings or fried smoked back fat are used; it makes up 15 to 25 % of the weight of the dough. The quark filling contains quark and boiled potatoes in a ratio of 1:2, eggs and sugar, and makes up 30 to 45 % of the weight of the dough.

Dough and fillings are prepared exclusively by hand; the dough is rolled out into a round, and the size of the flatbread is governed by the wooden bread peel. It is baked in an oven of rubble stone heated with hardwood such as robinia, beech, oak or hornbeam. The right temperature of over 300 °C is reached when the oven rake (“ohrablo”) strikes sparks as it is drawn across the stone. Then the embers are pushed to the back and the ash is wiped away with a wet broom. The flatbreads bake side by side and are moved with the oven rake so that they cook evenly: about five minutes without filling, about seven to ten minutes with filling or topping. They are then brushed with melted butter, vegetable oil or pork, duck or goose fat.

Origin & history

The area is the municipality of Hrušov on the southern edge of the Krupinská Planina plateau in the Banská Bystrica region, near Veľký Krtíš, Krupina and Šahy in the former county of Hont. Because the farmsteads were scattered and remote, people provided for themselves: they built stone ovens of rubble stone and made their own tools, including bread peels, goose or duck wings for removing the ash, the oven rake and brooms made of maize husks.

In the local dialect, “lepník” denotes a round pastry baked in a stone oven; according to the specification, the name has been in use since the first half of the 18th century, and the specification speaks of a 300-year tradition. According to the folklorist J. Botík, in its most original form the flatbread was baked from unleavened dough for the Christmas Eve meal. In the first decades of the 20th century it was a festive food: on Christmas Eve all family members and the domestic animals ate a piece of it, and it was also served during Lent, at Easter and during communal work such as feather stripping and yarn spinning. Later it was baked once a week before the bread, on Saturdays, so that the bread would be fresh for Sunday. In 2014 it received the certificate “Regional product HONT”; since 1996 it has been baked at the folklore festival “Hontianska paráda” in Hrušov.