Petulla — Albanian fried dough you should eat for breakfast

If one smell says Albanian home cooking, it is petulla frying on a rainy morning — soft rounds of dough dropped into hot oil until they blister gold and puff up hollow. Simple, cheap and deeply comforting, petulla is the breakfast grandmothers make and the thing you should order the moment you see it steaming behind a village counter.

What it actually is

The dough is nothing fancy: flour, water or milk, a little yeast or yogurt, and salt, left to rise until soft, then pulled into rough pieces and fried. Good petulla is crisp at the edges and airy inside, never greasy. Cooks across the country each swear by their own knack — a splash of raki in the batter, a spoon of yogurt for tang — so no two kitchens make them quite alike.

How to eat it

Albanians go sweet or savoury, often both on the same plate:

• with honey drizzled over the top — the classic
• with fruit jam, especially fig or sour cherry
• with djathë or gjizë, the country's salty white cheese and fresh curd
• dusted with sugar, or dunked in strong morning coffee

The sweet-and-salty combination — honey and cheese together — is the one to try first.

Petulla has cousins all across the Balkans — the fried doughs Serbians call uštipci, Bulgarians mekitsa, Hungarians lángos — but Albanians treat theirs as everyday comfort rather than festival food. They turn up on lazy Sundays, on the first cold morning of autumn, and whenever a guest arrives unannounced and something warm has to appear fast.

Where and when

Petulla is a home food above all, so a family guesthouse breakfast in Theth, Berat or the Alps is your best shot at the real thing. In towns, look for small bakeries and byrektore serving them early; markets sometimes fry them fresh. They are firmly a morning affair, though street stalls happily sell them all day.

Eat them hot, straight from the oil, before they lose their puff — that first crisp, honey-soaked bite is the whole point.