Svinski Ushi: Grilled Pork Ear with Bulgarian Beer
Fifteen hundred kilos of pork ears in a single weekend. That is how much ten thousand people got through, according to the local press, at the second edition of a festival that the city of Stara Zagora threw for a single dish - and in Czechia that dish counts as scrap from a home pig slaughter rather than a reason to celebrate.
Svinski ushi (Bulgarian: свински уши) are pork ears, first boiled until soft, then rolled in spices and grilled until crisp - hot meze that in Bulgarian cuisine lands on the table right next to a beer. Don't go looking for meat in them. This is skin, cartilage and heat.
What Svinski Ushi Means and Where Else They Grill It
The name gives everything away: svinski ushi means pork ears, plain and simple, and menus usually add na skara, off the grill. The nickname is the more interesting part. In Stara Zagora, which Bulgarian papers happily call the capital of grilled ears, they go by starozagorski kalmari - Stara Zagora calamari. Sliced into strips, the grilled cartilage really does look like rings of fried squid, and Stara Zagora sits a good hundred kilometers from the sea. The dish itself is eaten all over the country; one city just made it its calling card.
Cross the border and the trail goes cold fast. Romanian cuisine has almost the same thing under the literal name urechi de porc la grătar and serves it with cold beer too, so here the dish is genuinely shared. And for the record: they grill pork ears in Madrid as well, as the tapa oreja a la plancha, only with garlic, parsley and lemon - but that is a different family.
How Long Bulgaria Has Been Putting Ears on the Grill
Anyone hunting for ancient roots won't find them here. Guidebooks like to write about a time-honored folk tradition, but no source, cookbook or date says when Bulgarians first put an ear on the grill - the one fixed point in its history is quite recent: the pork ear festival in Stara Zagora, where those fifteen hundred kilos went down. It came out of pubs, butcher shops and roadside grills, where something always had to be done with the pig's head. Cartilage was cheap, the grill was right there and so was the beer. Some traditions never get told - they just get eaten.
Why the Ear Is Boiled First and What Goes with It
The lead role in this dish doesn't go to the spices but to the pot. A raw ear is as tough as shoe leather, so before it ever sees the grill it boils in salted water for about three quarters of an hour, until the cartilage softens and the skin gives - only then is it patted dry, rolled in a spice mix or left in a marinade and put over the fire, where the surface turns golden and crisp while the inside stays soft, almost gelatinous. Bulgarian recipes don't agree on the marinade: some swear by garlic and paprika, others by soy sauce with lemon, and the table often ends up with onion, lemon and the colorful salt sharena sol.
You eat it as meze, meaning something to go with a drink, and that is the most important sentence for anyone ordering an ear for the first time. A portion runs to about three hundred grams and is meant for a whole table and several beers, not for one person as a main course - order it instead of dinner and half an hour later you are sitting over a plate of cartilage wondering where you went wrong. It works best sliced into strips, eaten with a fork or with your fingers, with a spoonful of garlic sauce on every piece and a sip of Bulgarian beer in between. It is worth looking for in places with skara on the sign and in mehanas, the traditional Bulgarian taverns.
Cartilage and Beer in Varna
I ate grilled ear in Varna, at the Staria Chinar Restaurant (see Where to Eat in Varna), where they boil it, coat it in spices, grill it crisp and bring it out with garlic sauce. What arrived was a slice with charred edges on a plate decorated with blue flowers and pomegranate seeds, as if the kitchen knew the ear is not photogenic on its own. It crunched on top, turned slippery underneath, and the cartilage pushed back a little as I bit down; the spices brought the heat and the cold garlic sauce evened everything out. For a Czech it is a very unusual thing to eat, I'll admit; but this wasn't my first ear - in Spain I had it chopped and grilled with a spicy pepper sauce, and that was on the menu of two Michelin-starred restaurants. Nobody in Varna was talking about stars, the calamari from Stara Zagora are still waiting for me, and this snack to go with beer or wine came to roughly 9.35 BGN (4.40 EUR).
