What do Ukrainians eat for breakfast?

Yulia Horodnycha
3 min readApr 12, 2022

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Ukrainians are all very different, everyone can have their own preferences. I will try, as a Ukrainian, to describe average preferences.

I really hope that this will help you to know a little bit more about Ukrainian culture. Thank you so much for your openness and kindness.

All pics in this article are from Kyiv restaurants (because I am from Kyiv), so restaurant’s food looks better than average home food, but the taste is similar.

There is no name of Kyiv restaurants because this is not advertising, but it could be some writings in Ukrainian on pics with descriptions of dishes.

Eggs

Ukrainians like eggs a lot for breakfast. It could be boiled eggs, scrambled eggs, fried eggs, omelettes, poached eggs etc. Eggs could be served with vegetables / mushrooms / sausages / chicken / cheese / bread or oatmeal.

This is a basic and quick breakfast — just boiled eggs, bread, butter and cheese
Fried eggs with cheese, vegetables, cheese and bread
Omelette with salmon (or it could be replaced with chicken or sausages) and vegetables
Omelette with mushrooms, vegetables, baguette with butter. The Ukrainian text says “Morning like at home”.

The omelette above is with herbs. Ukrainians like to add dill or parsley sometimes to different meals.

Omelette can also be placed on bread
Fried eggs with sausages (but I should say that most Ukrainians eat boiled sausages, not fried ones)

Bread, buns and croissants

Ukrainians like sourdough and brown bread.

The bread can be used for sandwiches, or it can be eaten simply as an appetizer with the main dish, such as an omelette.

Sandwich with ham and tomato
Sandwich with poached egg, cheese and salmon (Instead of salmon, we usually use ham or chicken)
Sandwich with boiled eggs and vegetables
Buns with mushrooms, vegetables and chicken
Buns with cheese and bacon
Croissant with cheese, ham and vegetables

Croissants are also popular in Ukraine. They could have sweet taste also with chocolate, for example.

Oatmeal

Ukrainians could serve oatmeal with eggs, cheese, mushrooms, sausages, chicken or bacon. Oatmeal could also be served as a sweet dish with raisins, nuts, berries, honey, fruits etc.

Oatmeal with poached egg and bacon
Oatmeal with poached egg, cheese, mushrooms and herbs.
Sweet oatmeal with seeds, nuts and grapes.

Sweet oatmeal also could be cooked with milk or yoghurt.

Cottage cheese (tvorog)

Ukrainians could eat cottage cheese with berries, yoghurt or jam for breakfast

Cottage cheese (tvorog) with berries

Cornflakes

Cornflakes with milk

Muesli or granola

Muesli or granola with yoghurt and cherries

There are more complicated dishes, which Ukrainians often cook on weekends because you need more time to cook them.

For example, pancakes (we have our traditional types of pancakes: mlyntsi, syrnyky, oladky), a casserole of cottage cheese, varenyky, linyvi (lazy) varenyky and much more different dishes. I will review them in the next article. Thank you for reading and for your interest in Ukrainian ccuisine.

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