I Try It So You Don’t Have To: Pinkelwurst

A friend of mine has been telling me about Pinkelwurst for a long time, and I finally had a chance to be in the same place as him, and his mysterious sausage. As far as sausages go pinkelwurst is a pretty simple thing that really speaks to the nature of sausage, namely “lets jam some leftover bits of meat and stuff into a tube and eat it.”

The combination of pork and beef suet is an odd one, but color me intrigued. The only way I have ever really seen suet is as bird feed, so eating it was going to be a new experience.

The traditional way to serve these is steamed or boiled and served on top of kale. The real oddity is that it is typically cut open, and the contents are turned out of the casing, rather than sliced and served. We were out of kale so in the end we just served up in a bowl.

While it didn’t look very appealing, it smelled delicious. The onion was strong and you could smell the oats as well. It didn’t have a strong meaty smell at all.  I dug in for a taste and was very pleasantly surprised. The oats had soaked in all the pork, fat, and spices. Each bite was loaded with the texture of well prepared steel cut oats, and the rich flavor of pork. I can see where the slight bitterness of kale would be a great complement to this dish.

Pinkelwurst gets a very strong “try it”, if you can find it. Especially in late summer into fall when you can find wonderful fresh kale to serve it with.