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Papua New GuineaFlavors · Baixa Silésia
Smoked pork cooked with dried plums, pears and other fruits, served with a sweet-and-sour fruit sauce and dumplings. The name means Silesian heaven, and the dish is on the Lower Silesia Traditional Products List.
Traditional dish from Baixa Silésia
Also known as: Schlesisches Himmelreich, niebo śląskie
Illustrative images. The pictures in this guide are illustrations based on the real place, not photographs, and may differ from it.
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Śląskie niebo — Baixa Silésia, Poland
Śląskie niebo, Silesian heaven in Polish, combines smoked pork and dried fruit. The meat, traditionally smoked with alder wood, is soaked, cooked and seasoned. The fruits, mainly dried plums, pears and preserved fruits, are cooked in a dark, sweet-and-sour sauce. The dish is served with dumplings: potato kluski or buchty, small yeast buns steamed until cooked.
The dish is known throughout Silesia, a historical region now divided among several voivodeships, and it also has a German name, Schlesisches Himmelreich. Ministry of Agriculture sources link it to the time of the pig slaughter, when smoked meat was kept at home, and note that dishes like this added variety to everyday meals in an era when celebrations were rare.
Śląskie niebo appears on the Lower Silesia Traditional Products List, the voivodeship of Wrocław, and is part of Wrocław’s culinary tradition. The combination of smoked meat and dried fruit, common in Central European cuisine, is what distinguishes the dish.
Baixa Silésia
Śląskie niebo is on the Lower Silesia Traditional Products List and is recommended for visitors to Wrocław, the region’s capital.
Smoked pork, dried plums, pears and other dried or preserved fruits. Served with potato kluski or buchty.
Hot, with the meat sliced, fruit sauce on top and the dumplings on the side.
Family celebrations and birthdays; in Silesian tradition, also associated with the pig slaughter.
Your questions
A Silesian dish of smoked pork with a sweet-and-sour sauce of dried plums, pears and other fruits, served with potato or yeast dumplings. The name means Silesian heaven.
It is a savory main course, but the dried fruit sauce gives the smoked meat a sweet-and-sour flavor.
Flavors of Poland
Stew of sauerkraut and cabbage with various meats, smoked sausage and dried mushrooms, slowly cooked and reheated over days until the flavors meld. It is one of the dishes most connected to Polish identity and appears in the national poem Pan Tadeusz.
Round yeast dough pastry, fried, without a hole, filled with jam—traditionally rose petal or plum—and dusted with sugar or covered in icing. It’s the sweet of Tłusty Czwartek, the fatty Thursday before Lent, celebrated across the country.
Dumplings made from unleavened dough, boiled in water and sometimes browned in butter, with savory or sweet fillings. The ruskie, filled with potato and fresh cheese, are the most common, and the cabbage with mushrooms variety is served on Christmas Eve.
Vodka made entirely in Poland from rye, wheat, barley, oats, triticale or potatoes grown in the country. The name is a national geographical indication that applies to both neutral vodka and flavored vodkas that follow the rules.
A sour soup made with zakwas, a fermented rye-flour starter, served with white sausage, a boiled egg and horseradish. It is one of the most important dishes of the Polish Easter and is sometimes served inside a loaf of bread.
Braided bread ring first boiled in very hot water and then baked, topped with salt, poppy seeds, or sesame. It’s sold from street carts in Kraków and has a European Union protected geographical indication.
A round wheat dough disk topped with raw chopped onion and poppy seed, baked until the edge is golden. It originated in the Jewish bakeries of Lublin’s old town and has a European Union protected geographical indication.
Yeast-based cake covered with a buttery streusel, made plain or filled with white cheese, poppy seed or apple. It is the wedding cake of Opole Silesia and has a European Union protected geographical indication.
Grated raw potato cake with fried bacon, onion, eggs and a little flour, baked in a pan until the crust is golden. It’s one of the most popular dishes of Podlaskie, the northeastern region of Poland, and is on the List of Traditional Products.
Flavored vodka with bison grass that grows in the clearings of the Białowieża and Knyszyn forests in Podlaskie. It has a light green-golden color and the smell of dry hay, and the official name is a protected geographical indication of the European Union.
Croissant in a crescent shape, made from yeast-leavened puff pastry, filled with white poppy seed paste with fruit and nuts, and topped with icing and chopped nuts. It is Poznań’s Saint Martin’s pastry, eaten on November 11, and has protected geographical indication.
Beef roulade stuffed with bacon, pickled cucumber and onion, cooked in sauce and served with kluski śląskie — potato dumplings with a little indentation in the middle — and red cabbage. It’s the Sunday lunch of Upper Silesia.
Long pastry made from leavened dough, fried and usually filled with seasoned ground meat with pepper. It originated in Szczecin in the early 1970s, made on a Soviet machine from 1969, and is on Poland’s List of Traditional Products.
Honey cake with pepper, cinnamon, cardamom, ginger and other spices, molded in wooden molds or cut into shapes. It has been made in Toruń without interruption since the Middle Ages and is on Poland’s national list of intangible cultural heritage.
Two-layer chocolate sponge cake with whipped cream in the middle, covered in chocolate and often topped with a cherry. It originated in Warsaw in the late 1940s, and the name is linked to the W-Z avenue, opened during the city’s reconstruction.
A very sour sauerkraut soup with smoked pork ribs or other smoked pork, served with boiled potato on the side or with bread. It’s the dish of the highlanders of Podhale, the Zakopane region at the foot of the Tatra Mountains.
