It doesn’t look atractivly when you imagine pastry full of crackling,
but the taste is incredibly good.

In Serbia we call it Bačka pogača, which means Pastry from Bačka – a geographical and historical area divided between Serbia and Hungary. Most of the area is located within the Vojvodina region in Serbia and Novi Sad, the capital of Vojvodina. This recipe is caracteristic for this area because a lot of people who live in a cantryside do cattle breeding, specially pigs breeding.  In a period of pig slaughter, they made also fresh cracklings which is the main ingredient for this recipe.

Ingredients for this Vojvodina specialty:

500ml lukewarm milk
1 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp dry yeast
2 eggs
1 tsp salt
670g Schär Bread Mix – Mix B flour

+ 300g ground cracklings
100g lard

Preparation:

Place the milk, sugar and yeast in a bowl, stir and leave for 15 minutes until yeast get activated. Keep in mind that milk is lukewarm, not to hot or cold, so the yeast can get rise.

Add mixed eggs, salt and flour and kneed until you get soft, nonstickey dough. You can always add some extra flour for kneading.

When the dough is ready, use a rolling pin and roll the dough. Grease the dough with lard and cracklings, then fold the dough. Use rolling pin and roll the dough again, grease with the lardand crackings and repet the process one more time. Cut the dough in a 3 strips and make a braid of it.

Place the braids on a baking tin, covered with the baking paper and leave one hour to rise. Bake around 30 minutes on 230ºC. Check from time to time, just in case because not every owen heat the same.

You can make this recipe in any other form, like cakes, buns, and it also goes with other fillings, cheese, jam, cinnamon …