Smetana (dairy product)

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For the composer, see Bedřich Smetana.

Smetana is a dairy product in Central and Eastern Europe, a variety of sour cream similar to crème fraîche, much heavier than the Western European variety^{[citation needed]}.

The cream is called smetana in Russian, Bulgarian, Czech, Finnish, Belarusian, Slovenian, and Ukrainian (written сметана in the Cyrillic alphabet), śmietana in Polish, Shmetana in Yiddish, smotana in Slovak, hapukoor (literally sour cream) in Estonian, grietinė in Lithuanian, skābs krējums in Latvian, smântână in Romanian, Schmetten or Schmand in German, tejföl ("milktop") in Hungarian; павлака, pavlaka in Serbian and Macedonian and just pavlaka or mileram in Bosnian, and vrhnje in Croatian. Smetana is widely used in many Eastern European cuisines, for example, blended into thick soups like borscht (beet soup) or solyanka, or served on the plate with vareniki (boiled dumplings) or pelmeni. There are also very popular salads with smetana.

Smetana/Smietana (pronounced Shmetana) is also a given surname in some Ashkenazi Jewish families, of Poland and Russia. As such, Shmetana means sour cream in Yiddish.

In Zagreb and Zagorje region of Croatia vrhnje is added to local version of low-fat cottage cheese, perhaps sprinkled with salt, paprika and chopped onions, scallion, garlic, radish and/or horseradish, and eaten with dense, intensely yellow corn bread proja. While virtually every Croatian dairy produces cottage cheese (sir) and vrhnje, connoisseurs hold that only that purchased from a kumica (literally godmother), a milkmaid selling her own products on farmers' market is the real item. Eurosceptics were recently using sir i vrhnje as a symbol of local products that would allegedly disappear under European standardization (BBC article).

When comparing brands or suppliers of smetana, the Polish and Russian practice is to note the fat content of the varieties. Fat content can range from 10% (runny) to 70% (thick), most common, as would be found in supermarket, are 12%, 18%, 30% and 42%. Addition of thickeners (e.g. gelatine), even though not forbidden by relevant regulations, is regarded as cheating and the product considered substandard and unsuitable for culinary use since some recipes are easily spoiled by the presence of a thickener.