Tochitură.

Name: Tochitură (Romanian Pork Stew with Polenta and Egg)
Prep time: 20 min
Cook time: 1 h 10 min
Total time: 1 h 30 min
Yield: 4 servings
Cuisine: Romania
Ingredients: 800 g pork shoulder, in 3 cm cubes; 250 g smoked coarse pork sausage, in thick slices; 200 g pork liver and heart, in small cubes; 1 tbsp lard, or sunflower oil; 8 cloves garlic, roughly chopped; 200 ml dry white wine; 1 tbsp tomato paste; 1 tsp freshly ground black pepper; 1 tsp dried thyme; to taste salt; 200 g coarse cornmeal, cooked into mămăligă; 4 eggs, for frying; 150 g brânză de burduf or feta, crumbled or grated

Romanian Pork Stew with Polenta and Egg

Tochitură moldovenească · say it: toh-kee-TOO-ruh

Tochitură is pork cooked the blunt way: shoulder cut into cubes, browned hard in its own rendered fat with smoked sausage and often a piece of liver or heart, then deglazed with white wine and simmered with garlic until the meat is tender and the sauce has reduced to something closer to a glaze than a gravy. It goes onto a slab of mămăligă, gets a shower of salty sheep cheese and a fried egg laid on top, and that is the plate. The taste is fatty, garlicky and slightly sharp from the wine, cut by the plain corn underneath and the runny yolk over everything. It is Sunday food, festival food and — with a bowl of pickles alongside — one of the most direct expressions of how Romania eats pork.

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Romanian Pork Stew with Polenta and Egg

Gate: Romania
Prep: 20 min
Cook: 1 hr 10 min
Total time: 1 hr 30 min
Serves: 4
Status: Medium
Nutrition / serving · estimated: Calories 780 kcal; Protein 47 g; Carbs 42 g; Fat 45 g; Fiber 3 g; Sodium 1200 mg

Why this recipe works.

Browns the pork properly in batches, so the sauce is built on fond rather than on stock added at the end.
Uses the classic Moldavian white wine and garlic finish, with clear guidance on how far to reduce it.
Offal is offered as an option with real instructions instead of being quietly dropped from the recipe.
Plates the dish the way it is actually served — mămăligă base, sheep cheese, fried egg on top.

Tips from our kitchen.

Use pork shoulder with its fat, cut into 3 cm cubes. Loin dries out and gives you tough chips of meat in a fatty sauce.
Brown in two or three batches with space between the cubes. A crowded pan steams the pork grey and you lose the fond the sauce is built from.
Start the pork in a dry, hot pan with only a spoon of lard — it will render its own fat within a few minutes and you can pour off the excess later.
Add the garlic late, after the wine, so it perfumes the sauce rather than burning into bitterness at the start.
Reduce until the sauce clings to the meat and the fat separates out at the edges of the pan. Watery tochitură slides off the mămăligă instead of sitting on it.
Fry the eggs in the pork fat, not in fresh oil, and keep the yolks runny — they are part of the sauce.

Substitutions.

Smoked Romanian sausage (cârnați afumați) → Kielbasa, Polish smoked sausage, or a coarse smoked pork sausage: You want something smoked and coarse-textured rather than finely emulsified. Avoid chorizo, which brings paprika and vinegar that pull the dish somewhere else entirely.
Pork liver and heart → Leave them out and increase the shoulder to 1 kg: The offal is traditional in Moldavia and adds a mineral depth, but the dish holds up perfectly without it. If using liver, add it in the last 5 minutes only — longer and it turns to grit.
Brânză de burduf → Feta, or a mixture of feta and grated pecorino: What is needed is salt and sheep tang against the fat. A mild cow cheese disappears into the sauce and contributes nothing.

Variations.

Tochitură ardelenească: The Transylvanian take: smoked meats, sweet paprika and onion, no egg, and often a thicker sauce. Served with mămăligă and sour cream instead.
Tochitură cu roșii: The southern version, loosened with grated tomato and hot peppers so the result is closer to a stew that can be eaten with bread.
Tochitură de post: A fasting adaptation built on mushrooms and onion in place of pork, kept sharp with wine and garlic and served on mămăligă without cheese or egg.

Storage & reheating.

The pork mixture keeps 3 days refrigerated and reheats well in a covered pan over low heat with a splash of water — the fat re-emulsifies as it warms. Cook fresh eggs and fresh mămăligă each time rather than reheating them. It freezes for 2 months without the offal, which turns grainy after thawing. Cold leftover tochitură chopped and fried with day-old mămăligă slices makes a good next-day breakfast.

Serve with

Mămăligă, cold smântână, pickled cucumbers or gogoșari, and a glass of dry white wine.

The story behind Tochitură.

The name comes from a toca, to chop or mince finely, and describes the method rather than a fixed recipe: whatever pork is on hand, cut small and cooked down in a pan. That flexibility is the point. Historically it was a dish of the pig slaughter, made in the days around Ignat in December when there were offcuts, fresh sausage and organ meat to use before anything was cured, cooked in a big pan and eaten by everyone who had helped with the work.

Regional versions diverge sharply. Moldavian tochitură — the one most people mean — includes offal, uses white wine, and always arrives with mămăligă, brânză and a fried egg; it is the version served across northern Romania. Transylvanian versions lean on smoked meats and paprika and skip the egg. Wallachian ones often add tomato and hot peppers and are looser, closer to a stew you would eat with bread. The dish also appears with different meats entirely at village festivals, and in the mountains the fat is often lard with a spoon of the previous batch stirred in.

What has not changed is the plating. The mămăligă is not a side dish here, it is the base of the construction, and the fried egg is not a garnish either — the yolk breaks into the sauce and the corn and functions as an extra layer of richness. Brânză de burduf, the matured sheep cheese of the Carpathians, adds salt and sharpness that keeps the whole thing from being simply heavy. Romanians tend to eat it at midday rather than at night, for reasons that become obvious about twenty minutes after finishing a plate.

Questions, answered.

What cut of pork should I use?

Shoulder, sometimes sold as pork butt or spare rib, with its fat left on. It has enough intramuscular fat and connective tissue to stay tender through 45 minutes of simmering. Loin and fillet are the wrong choice — they are lean and go stringy — while belly works if you like it very rich and reduce the added lard accordingly.

Do I have to include the liver and heart?

No. Offal is standard in the Moldavian version and gives a deeper, more mineral flavour, but plenty of Romanian households make it with shoulder and sausage alone. If you do use liver, cut it small and add it only in the final five minutes, because it hardens quickly and turns dry and grainy with longer cooking.

My sauce is watery. What went wrong?

Either the pan was crowded so the meat released water instead of browning, or the wine was not reduced far enough before the simmer. Fix it by lifting the meat out and boiling the liquid down hard until it thickens and the fat separates at the edges, then returning the pork. The finished sauce should coat the cubes rather than pool around them.

Can I make it without wine?

Yes, though you lose the acidity that keeps a very fatty dish balanced. Replace the wine with stock plus a tablespoon of white wine vinegar or the brine from a jar of pickles, added at the same point in the cooking. Do not simply use water — the dish will taste flat and greasy without something sour in it.

What is the fried egg actually for?

It is a functional part of the plate, not decoration. The yolk is left runny so that when it breaks it thickens the sauce and coats the mămăligă, adding richness that ties the corn, the cheese and the pork together. Romanians break it into the food immediately rather than eating it separately.

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