Polish food at home or out?

Do you prepare Polish food at home? If so, is it mostly from scratch or prefab stuff (like Gorący Kubek, powder soups, heat & eat things, deli items, microwavable dinners, etc.)?

What percentage of the time (roughly) do you prepare food at home as opposed to eating out or getting take-aways?
What is the rough proportion of the Polish to non-Polish food you eat regardless of the above sources?

Only at home, only natural ingredients, nothing pre-made. We bake bread and smoke sausages at home.

Congrats! Good for you!

I was talking to an American friend of mine about this because the issue was raised on PF that it is cheaper to eat out than at home in the States.

According to my friend's account, you can usually only buy huge packets of food in a supermarket and it is not cheap, whereas you can buy a ready cooked meal for one for very little.

I know one particular American who only eats take aways, can barely make it out of her flat she is that big and even eats off disposable plates to save on washing, I am not saying it's the norm but it is unthinkable here.

This is in complete contrast to what it is like here, the food in restaurants is more expensive and I would say of average quality (depending).

And despite the absolute horseshit you hear from some people on these forums, McDonalds is considered cheap, poor quality and just fast food (i.e. nothing special).

I generally do two shoppings for food here, one from super markets: Carrefour (I'd say average priced) biedronka (cheap as chips) and from a green grocers or farmer's market (very fresh, usually local, only in season, fruits and veg).


None of the above, I can't remember even seeing a microwave dinner but they are probably there if I looked.


I cook about 90% of my meals at home, the 10% is only if I work over time or when friends/family are over.


I am not sure if you mean traditional Polish meals verses Thai or something or the actual ingredients.
I would not consider porridge a traditional Polish breakfast but the stuff I eat for breakfast most days, comes from Poland, if you know what I mean.

So most of the food I eat is Polish but not all of it would be considered traditional.

Best food in Poland is cooked by babcias, that's why milk bars (Bar Mleczny) sometimes have the best food for eating out and really are cheap.

It depends where you eat out, what you order and where you live. Some restaurants are more expensive than others for the same meal. And some meals you prepare at home can be more expensive if you buy them in more expensive stores.

A Polish person came to the US and had a bad opinion of American fast foods without even trying. He would not eat a burger from a restaurant because it was wrapped in paper, but at home he would make the same burger served on a plate and eat it. A lot of this is in your mind.

That Polish person's opinion was correct. American fast food is disgusting and nutritionally lacking. If this Pole did make a hamburger at hme it certainly wasn't the same as that which he would've gotten at a fast food restaurant, because the components of the hamburger chain's sandwich are full of preservatives and chemical flavor enhancers.


This isn't true. Even the 99 cent items at a fast food restaurant can be made more cheaply at home.
As for Polish food where I live. There are only two Polish restaurants in the whole of Southern California and neither are near my home.

Ever watch Super size me?
It's great.


Does it not depend?
I am only relating what I was told, so I am in no position to argue with anyone on this.

Very simple way to deal with the whole food/health issue. it's all about balance.

I suppose if one factored in a price for the labor it takes to prepare one's own meals then the cheapest restaurants may be more economical. I had my dinner from a chinese place next to my apartment every night for years and I am sure that those 6 dollars got me vegetables and tofu in a more delicious black bean sauce than I could've managed to prepare on my own.

That's cheap.

lets talk money, I will pull a price of a random average meal from a restaurant and one at home (here in Poland).

Just a meal for one in a restaurant, meat, potatoes and veg, costs about 19-24 zloty (about 7-9 dollars).

Where as you could spend the same amount and have food for two people for two days.
(Veg is really cheap from a green grocers or farmer's market, it's the meat that costs).


I remember some statistic that Poles go out the least to restaurants in Europe and this was slowly changing due to an increase expendable income.

It was great, for 6 dollars I got a tureen of hot and sour soup, eggrolls, wontons, rice, and Hunan tofu with lots of garlic and vegetables. So much garlic that I eventually started avoiding eating most of it and at the end of each dinner there would be a shockingly large pile of slivered garlic next to my plate.

Generally the Chinese places here are what I call "Polish Chinese", never spicy, half the plate is cabbage, the sweet and sour sauce is some kind of ketchup and generally the ingredients are for Polish dishes not Asian.

One of the best things about multicultural America is the delicious variety of cuisine and the sauces are to die for.

Here, if it is a good tasty Asian restaurant it's at least twice the price that I mentioned earlier and the ones I have been to are higher end rather than takeaway jobbies.

In Krakow there are many (maybe mostly) French restaurants after Polish and the new fad is Sushi.

Can be please get back to Polish food.

By and large, the same food can be rpepared at home for a fraction of the cost of the catetring industry. They've got lots of overhead (rent, hired staff, equipment, etc.) adn nweed to make a profit to sruvive. Maybe fast-food joints might appear cheaper but usually there is a vast difference in quality. Their burgers, for insatcne, are made with various scraps of meat and lots of suet,whereas for home use many poeple by better mince such as beef sirloin. Also, at home you can eliminate all the chemcial flavour enhancers, fake aromas, artificial colouring and other adulterants especailly prevalent in oriental take-aways.

Well we buy the Polish sausages from a near by butcher, but otherwise everything we eat for lunch is Polish and prepared from scratch :) There's nothing better then Polish food :) Lol. I think maybe theres one meal a week we eat that's not typically all polish, but that's it? And we rarely eat take aways, like maybe once a month/2 months?

And what would say is Polish?

The vast majority of Polish cuisine could also be called German, Czech, Ukrainian, etc. In general, Polish food is just plain old Northern European fare.

We had the First Holy communion at home recently. The cost of food for the whole day for 25 people totalled about 300 zlotys, while the catering site would charge 100 zlotys per person, that is 2500.

It is natural we prefered to do it at home and save a lot, especially that we were helped by the family.


Yes, that is the problem that the green stuff is seasonal:

However, off-season you can grow your own greenery and it is even healthier than farmers` produce:


You can also have cheap meat, as cheap as dirt if you know how to find and catch it.

Polish Peasant dish
Polish Aboriginal dish
Polish Indian dish

Only Polish food, nothing imported!

Not if you bought the same piece of meat in a store and fry it up yourself.
One thing I noticed that some Polish people do around here is when they grill out, they pour oil all over the meat. Just wondering if that is normal in poland, like pouring ketchup on your pizza.

Strange... grilled meat should be poured with beer while roasting, but oil?!

Why don't you ask them? I have never seen it done, whether in Poland or elsewhere.

The Brazilians all do this too.

Almost everyone does it in Poland. Why deny it? Besides, who cares. Different country, different habits. Our pizza here tastes way to good to mess it up with a ketchup.

but who cares, right?

yes pgtx, I don't care what and how you guys eat, I just choose to eat what I like and do it my way.

Can you live with this statement better than with the one above?

excellent, and we don't care :)

Pour oil over grilled meat?!

good for you :-) Since we all don't care, why even continue this topic? heh


who does it?

Some weird Polish people living in the neighborhood of San Diego could even lace their coffee with sulfuric acid ;-)

Honestly, on my first trip to Romania I had a bad luck to meet two different people stuffing themselves with the extremely hot chili (chushka). This led me to believe all of them Romanian were lovers of spicy food. Nothing more wrong as it turned out later :-)

My wife likes to make pierogi and does a mighty fine job of it, I might add. She also makes broccoli soup (not really Polish but eaten here), cabbage soup and other tantalising soups. We are doing our utmost not to eat out due to the prohibitive costs involved but we may treat ourselves sometime soon.

Any more questions?

SeanBM wrote:


absolutely. no different than any other ethnic food in Poland, though. the beauty of cuisine in the USA is when you walk into a Chinese restaurant and then an Indian restaurant and then a Korean restaurant.....you are eating ingredients that the other foods simply don't have. always an experience, always an adventure with every meal. Chinese/Italian/Mexican in Poland....it's all a joke. Polish food disguised as something else.

Des Essientes wrote:


I'm not about to defend American fast food and say it's healthy, most of it is $hite, but isn't it funny to hear Poles standing around saying how gross food is from the USA, how it's so unhealthy and fatty while at the same time, they're chowing down on a big kielbasa in a bun, the guy next to him is eating a Zapiekanka and the girl next to them is eating fried pierogi dripping with butter stuffed with some ground up mystery meat? Poles have this thing in their head that if it comes from the motherland and their moms made it for them when they were little, it must be healthy. Fact of the matter is, that big kielbasa you're eating has 3 times as many calories as a hamburger patty from McDonald's, the pierogi is a total calorie bomba, and zapiekanka? Ghetto pizza heated up at some kiosk in a microwave. Bravo and bon appetit.