The Slavic east and the Balkans · Volume 28, Grill, Pepper and the Ottoman-Habsburg Line

Ajvar

Name: Ajvar
Total time: 3 h
Yield: Makes about 1.5 litres
Cuisine: The Western Balkans
Ingredients: 3 kg red peppers; 1 1 aubergine, optional, more common in Macedonian versions; 3 to 4 3 to 4 garlic cloves, optional, more common in Bosnian versions; 150 ml sunflower oil; to taste salt, sugar and a little vinegar to taste, the more common Serbian finish

Serbia, North Macedonia

Ajvar, slow-cooked roasted red pepper relish: a shallow white ceramic bowl filled with a thick, deep brick-red to rust-coloured relish, its surface glossy with a faint sheen of oil.

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time: 3 hours

Researched: 10 sources cited
Reviewed: Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked: Not yet cooked and reported

Not a garnish. A slow-cooked, roasted red pepper relish that stands as one of this cuisine's central preserves, and the dish this chapter treats with the most care around attribution, since Serbia and North Macedonia both hold formal protected-origin claims to specifically named regional versions, neither claim covering the generic word itself, and the argument has recently spilled into celebrity television and a genuine legal threat, detailed above.

by Serbia, North Macedonia

Ajvar, second, and now a genuinely three-cornered live dispute rather than a settled historical one. North Macedonia's claim is formal, as above. Serbia's claim runs through a specific place rather than the whole nation: "Leskovački domaći ajvar" carries protected geographical status from Serbia's own Intellectual Property Office plus international WIPO certification valid across twenty eight countries. One Serbian source states the underlying legal position plainly: no country, not Serbia, not Macedonia, not Bulgaria, has protected the generic word "ajvar" itself, only the specific named regional variants. That has not stopped the argument running hot in public: in 2026, on the American talk show "Hot Ones," the Kosovo-British singer Dua Lipa called ajvar "an Albanian specialty everyone should try before they die" while a jar visibly labelled "Leskovac ajvar," a specifically Serbian-registered product, sat on screen behind her; the city of Leskovac announced legal action, and Macedonian press covered a related row over her calling pljeskavica a "Kosovo sandwich." Named separately from that fight, and genuinely a different preparation rather than a regional name variant of the same one: pindžur, which adds tomato and is chopped rather than ground to a smooth paste, giving a coarser, milder, more acidic relish, and ljutenica, which combines pepper and tomato without the aubergine some ajvar recipes include. One further, quieter honesty this chapter carries rather than smooths over: Macedonian sourcing states its own tradition of ajvar-making dates only to around the Second World War, complicating any instinct to treat the relish as ancient in either of its claimant countries.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Makes about 1.5 litres. About 3 hours.

Ingredients

3 kg red peppers
1 1 aubergine, optional, more common in Macedonian versions
3 to 4 3 to 4 garlic cloves, optional, more common in Bosnian versions
150 ml sunflower oil
to taste salt, sugar and a little vinegar to taste, the more common Serbian finish

Method

Roast the peppers, and the aubergine if using, directly over an open flame or under a very hot grill until the skins blacken and blister all over.
Transfer to a covered bowl or bag while hot, and leave 15 to 20 minutes to steam, which loosens the skins.
Peel, deseed, and roughly chop or mince the flesh.
Simmer the peeled pepper flesh in a wide, heavy pan over low heat, stirring constantly, for about 2 hours, until the water has gone and the paste has darkened and concentrated.
Stir in the sunflower oil, and the garlic if using, for a final 10 to 15 minutes.
Season with salt, a little sugar, and vinegar to taste, and jar while hot.

What a modern chef changes

The two hours treated as the actual point, not the part to shortcut, plus real, open fire for the roast

Rung 4

Method

Roast the peppers over genuine live charcoal, a Big Green Egg run hot, rather than under a grill element. The direct char is what a jarred product cannot replicate, and it is the single clearest difference between a serious homemade ajvar and a shop one.
Do not rush the reduction. Two hours of slow, stirred simmering is concentrating flavour, not just cooking off water; a fast, high-heat reduction browns and bitters the sugars rather than deepening them.
Decide your version and commit to it rather than hedging between styles. Aubergine in for a Macedonian-leaning version, garlic in for a Bosnian-leaning one, or neither for the plainer Serbian style finished with salt, sugar and vinegar; naming which tradition you are following is more honest than a blended compromise that belongs to none of them.

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