Alsace & the North · Main
Choucroute Garnie à l'Alsacienne
- Intermediate
- 45 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with ferment tang with real depth behind it, wood-smoke running underneath, fading in warm spice.
Ingredients
- 1.5 kg raw fermented sauerkraut
- 120 g goose fat, or lard
- 2 onions, sliced thin
- 500 ml dry Riesling or Sylvaner
- 250 ml water
- 15 juniper berries
- 10 black peppercorns
- 3 bay leaves
- 2 cloves
- 600 g smoked pork shoulder (palette fumée), in one piece
- 300 g smoked pork belly, in one piece
- 4 Strasbourg sausages
- 2 Montbéliard sausages
- 1 kg waxy potatoes, peeled
- Coarse salt
- Strong mustard and grated horseradish, to serve
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
FermentationSweating aromatics: soft, never brownedThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boilSalted water & the float test
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: mustard · alcohol
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Rinse the sauerkraut once under cold water and squeeze it dry in handfuls. Taste a strand; it should still make you wince.
- Melt the goose fat in a deep pot and sweat the onions until slack and translucent with no colour, then pile in the kraut with the juniper, pepper, bay and cloves tied in muslin.
- Bed the smoked shoulder and belly down in the kraut, pour in wine and water to two thirds depth, cover and cook at 150C (300F) until a strand crushes to nothing between finger and thumb, about two and a half hours.
- Poach the Strasbourg and Montbéliard sausages in a separate pan of water held at 80C (176F) for 10 minutes, until plump and firm to a squeeze. Do not let it boil. 10 min
- Boil the potatoes in well salted water until a knife enters with no drag, then pile kraut, sliced meats, sausages and potatoes on a hot dish.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Fermentation 53 recipes
- Held somewhere with a steady temperature it can actually work at, chosen on purpose rather than wherever there happened to be room.
- There is visible activity before it is called started: bubbles, rise, or movement in the liquid. A ferment showing nothing after its first hours is not slow, it is not going.
- It smells clean: sour, yeasty, or alcoholic, with nothing putrid, and with nothing fuzzy or coloured growing where air meets it.
- Everything is under the liquid or under a cover, as the method requires: nothing solid left sitting dry in the air to spoil while the rest works.
- Judged by taste and behaviour and then STOPPED: chilled, baked, or refrigerated at the point wanted, rather than left running because the stated hours had not elapsed.
Where it goes wrong It was run on the clock in a kitchen colder or warmer than the recipe assumed. Fermentation is a rate and not a duration, so the same number of hours gives an under-developed ferment in a cold room and a slack, over-soured one in a warm one, and only tasting it would have said which.
The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil 183 recipes
- The surface is read rather than assumed: bubbles break slowly in one or two places, or the surface merely shivers, and it does not reach a rolling boil at any point.
- It was held there: the pot was watched and the heat adjusted rather than set once and left, and there is no tide mark up the pot wall from a boil-over.
- The liquid stayed as clear as it should be: no clouding from agitation, and no fat churned into an emulsion through it.
- Whatever is in the liquid is still intact: nothing shredded, broken up, or worried apart by movement.
- The level is roughly where the elapsed time should have left it; a large drop is the evidence that it ran hotter than this while nobody was looking.
Where it goes wrong It was brought to a boil and then left on the same heat, so it churned for the whole cook: the liquid clouded, the fat emulsified into it, and the solids broke apart into the broth.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Riesling or Grenache
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
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