Sheep cheese gnocchi with bacon , called halušky  is the most typical Slovak national food . Halušky are made from potato dough mixed with a special kind of sheep cheese – „bryndza“. Bryndza was originally made in so  called cottages of the shepherds or mountain chalets.

The dish is topped by fried bacon with melted lard. You can serve it with  buttermilk or acidified milk. Every  year, in the mountain village of Turecká at the foot of the Veľká Fatra mountains the lovers of sheep cheese gnocchi meet at the world championship in their cooking and consuming.

Ingredients:
700 g of potatoes
500 g of medium-coarse flour

50 g of smoked bacon
120 g of sheep cheese
salt

How to prepare:
Peel the potatoes and grate them finely. Mix flour and salt into the potatoes. . Mix the dough well, it should be stiffer, but so as it could be pushed through a sieve. Then push the dough through a sieve with bigger holes into boiling salted water. 

 

Stir the gnocchi occasionally throughout the cooking. When they float to the surface of the water, let them boil for another 2-3 minutes. In the meantime, fry the finely grated bacon. Take out the gnocchi with a sieve and allow them to drop and then hot, without washing them, put them into a bowl, where you have previously mixed sheep cheese with the gravy left after frying the bacon. 

 Sprinkle with bacon and pour over by a part of the gravy left after frying the bacon.