Ohio · Starter
Ohio Sauerkraut Balls
- Intermediate
- 75 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, ferment tang with real depth behind it, closing toasted and warm.
Ingredients
- 500g sauerkraut, drained and squeezed dry, chopped
- 250g bulk sausage
- 1 onion, minced
- 115g cream cheese
- 2 tbsp flour
- 1 tsp mustard
- 1 tsp caraway
- Salt and pepper
- For coating: 100g flour, 2 eggs beaten, 150g breadcrumbs
- Oil for frying
Equipment
Deep-fry pot
The skills inside
Deep fryingThe coat before the fry: dredge, crumb, batterSalting to draw the water outShaping by hand
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · egg · mustard
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
- Brown the sausage with the onion, then stir in the flour and cook 2 min. 2 min
- Add the chopped kraut, cream cheese, mustard, and caraway and cook until it binds into a thick paste. Cool and chill.
- Roll into walnut-sized balls.
- Dredge in flour, then egg, then breadcrumbs.
- Fry at 180C for 3-4 min until deep gold. Drain and serve hot with mustard. 4 min
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.
Salting to draw the water out 41 recipes
- Salted evenly over every surface rather than tipped on in one place and tossed once.
- Laid out so the water has somewhere to go: a colander, a rack, or a sieve over a bowl, never a flat dish where it sits back in what it gave up.
- Given real time, and there is visible liquid to show for it: a pool underneath, a drip, or a wrung handful.
- That liquid is removed. It is squeezed, blotted or poured away, and the food is dry to the touch before it goes anywhere near heat.
- The dish is seasoned knowing salt has already gone on, tasted before any more is added.
Where it goes wrong It went into the dish still wet, and was salted again out of habit. The water it was carrying dilutes and steams whatever it meets, so the result is watery and over-seasoned at once, and those are two faults that cannot be corrected in the same direction.
The coat before the fry: dredge, crumb, batter 80 recipes
- The coat is continuous before it goes anywhere near the fat: held up to the light, no bare patch of food shows through anywhere, seams and thin edges included.
- It is bonded rather than resting on top: a gentle shake sheds loose dust only, and the coat does not slide off as a sheet when the piece is handled.
- It bubbles hard and steadily from the moment it enters the fat, and the bubbling visibly slows as it finishes; those bubbles are the surface water leaving, and a quiet entry means the fat is too cool.
- Out and drained, it is an even gold-brown all over and it is still crisp several minutes later on a rack; a coat that softens within a minute of coming out never lost its water.
- Broken open, there is no paste of raw flour under the crust and no hollow gap where the coat has lifted away from the food.
Where it goes wrong The fat was below temperature or the pan was crowded, so the coat drank fat instead of sealing against it: it comes out pale and heavy, greasy to the fingers, and slumps off the food as it cools.
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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