Posts Tagged ‘pepper’

Homemade Sausages (Domáce Klobásy)

Ingredients: 4 lbs pork, black pepper, 2 cloves garlic, paprika (sweet red pepper), red pepper, salt, pork intestines or sausage casings
Prep Time: about 2 hours

In this recipe, I show you how to prepare home-made sausage (klobása), the way my grandma makes them. I may be little biased, but there is nothing better than a real Slovak sausage! They are even better smoked (údené). Slovak sausages are pretty similar to the Hungarian variety. When I lived in Lancaster, California, I was lucky to be close to a real treasure: a little shack in the middle of the Mojave desert called “The Valley Hungarian”. That shop had an amazing selection of smoked sausages, very similar to the ones my grandma makes. Unfortunately, sausages like that are very hard to find.

Slovak sausages are somewhat similar to the German bratwurst, but are less juicy and whole lot more peppery. The spices used in the making of a Slovak sausage are garlic, sweet and spicy red pepper, and caraway. You will also need ground pork, sausage casings and a way to feed the sausages. The recipe below shows you the traditional way of making sausages as done during zabíjačka. It involves grinding pork in a meat grinder (mlynček na mäso). You may have hard time finding these in America. You may want to skip this step and start with store-bought ground meat. However, you will need some device to feed the meet into the casings, and the casings themselves. We used pig intestines (črevá).

We used a “No. 10″ Porkert meat grinder, dating all the way back to 1954! It consists of the housing, a feeding spiral, a four-blade knife, and an exit plate with circular holes through which the meat comes out.

Cut the raw meat into pieces which will fit into the grinder. Grind the meat. You will probably need to disassemble and clean the grinder few times to remove the tendons that like to wrap around the blades.

Then add about 2 cloves of crushed garlic (postrúhaný cesnak, too much garlic will make your burp!), two teaspoons of ground black pepper (mleté čierne korenie), about 1.5 teaspoons of salt (soľ), a small teaspoon of caraway (rasca), about 4 teaspoons of paprika (sladká paprika), and another teaspoon of crushed spicy red pepper (štipľavá paprika, if you like it hot). Mix together. Then remove the blades and the exit grid, and replace with a feeder tube. The sausage mix was really popular with the cat. She even managed to grab a good chunk of meat out of my hand as I was feeding the sausages!

Next take the washed intestines (črevá). You need to make sure they don’t have holes in them. This is done by blowing into the intestine and seeing if it inflates like a balloon. Then roll a 2-meter long intestine onto the feeder tube. Tie a knot at the open end. If you end up with an air bubble, take a sewing pin and puncture a hole or two.

Next comes the fun part: making sausages. This is a two person operation, with one person feeding the meat into the grinder, and another adjusting the output. You want the meat to be packed quite stiff and especially uniform. This will take bit of practice. I helped with this step for a while, but my grandma was much better at it. So I mostly worked the grinder. Tie a knot at the other end as well.

You now have one 2 meter long sausage – bit too much to eat in one sitting. To turn it into more manageable pieces, grab the sausage about 15 cm from one end. Pinch there and push the meat to the sides. Then twist the free end around two times. Fold over, and cut the other end off. Then push out some of the meat from the open end back into the grinder and twist the casing shut. This doesn’t have to be too tight; the meat mixture is quite viscous and won’t drip out.

If you also decide to prepare hurky, follow the same steps, except that the open ends must be tied shut with a string. It’s probably best to clean the grinder before making hurky, otherwise you may end up with pieces of sausage in your hurka (the red chunks). Typically, the wider beef intestines are used for hurky, and the thinner pork intestines are used for sausages. Place sausages on a wooden stick and then off with them to the smokehouse.

Or if you don’t have a smokehouse, just bake them, grill them or fry them fresh. These turned out delicious! The photo shows the typical zabíjačka platter: baked sausage and hurka, with a side of mustard, baked potatoes and beets. Dobrú chuť!

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Sauerkraut Soup for Hundred (Kapustnica pre Sto)

For one 4-gallon batch (~50 servings)

Ingredients: 8 lb sauerkraut, 1 gallon water, 3 lb of pork neck, 16 peppercorns, 4 spoons caraway, 8 cloves garlic, 8 whole cloves, tablespoon crushed nutmeg, handful dried mushrooms, 7 onions, 7 apples, 3 lbs sausage and bacon, 4 tablespoons paprika, 4 tablespoons red pepper, 1.5lb tub of sour cream, few tablespoons flour
Prep Time: 4 hours

Regular Size (~12 servings)

Ingredients: 2 lb sauerkraut, 1 quart water, 0.8 lb of pork neck, 4 peppercorns, 1 spoons caraway, 2 cloves garlic, 2 whole cloves, bit of crushed nutmeg, smaller handful dried mushrooms, 2 onions, 2 apples, 0.8 lbs sausage and bacon, 1 tablespoons paprika, 1 tablespoons red pepper, small container of sour cream, tablespoon flour
Prep Time: 3 hours

Here is a recipe for the traditional Slovak Christmas sauerkraut soup kapustnica, for 100 people. This recipe will come in handy next time your 99 closest friends ask to come over for dinner…

Ok, you may be wondering why on Earth would I be posting a recipe for such a large quantity of soup. Well, the funny thing is that because of this website, I got asked if I could prepare a dish for the St. Nicholas Day celebration at the Slovak Embassy in Washington, D.C., hosted by the Slovak American Society of Washington. I had doubts about this, given that I had never before cooked so much food. But my friends persuaded me to take this great opportunity. The recipe posted here is more-or-less identical to the kapustnica recipe posted earlier. The difference is that photos are better (my new kitchen has much more light) and that this time I used the right kind of meat, krkovička (pork neck).

This is what the ingredients for a 100 person soup look like. Everything all together cost roughly 90 dollars.

For this soup you will need dried mushrooms. Dried mushrooms taste bit different from fresh ones, since the flavor is more concentrated. If you don’t find any in your grocery store, you can dehydrate mushrooms at home by leaving them uncovered on a paper towel for several days. Or you can lay them out, single-file, in an oven turned to low heat (warm or 200F). Dehydrated mushrooms will keep for a very long time. In Slovakia, it used to be common to go mushroom picking in the fall and then dry the mushrooms for use in winter soups. My family would dry them by hanging them from strings attached between beams in the kitchen. Kind of like drying laundry on a clothes line.

Let’s start cooking. Take a large pot (I used a 16L stock pot for each of the two batches), and add your sauerkraut (including the juice) and the water (voda). You don’t have to be too specific with the water, you can always add more later. You simply want to add enough to at least cover the cabbage (kapusta).

Wait for the soup to come to boil. With a large quantity of water like this, this may take a while. Once the water is boiling, add the pork neck meat (krkovička).

Add peppercorns (čierne korenie), caraway (rasca)…

…cloves (klinčeky), bay leaves (bobkové listy),…

…nutmeg (muškátový oriešok), shredded garlic (postrúhaný cesnak),…

…whole onions (celé cibule), with the outer skin removed and ends chopped off, and whole apples (celé jablká) with stems removed.

Add a handful of dried mushrooms (sušené hríby, more the better!) and some salt (soľ).

Cover, and let cook for a while. I cook it until the apples start cracking open on the outside. For a big batch like this, this will take at least an hour.

Then, take your favorite sausages (klobása) and bacon (slanina). There is a Polish sausage store in Rockville, MD, which supposedly sells the smoked, dried up and shriveled up Slovak sausage that should go in here. But it was bit out of my way so I used various typical grocery-stocked smoked sausages. I obtained the bacon (two kinds, regular and peppered) from Laurel meat market. This is also where I obtained the homemade sausage, which I cooked the previous day.

Slice the bacon and sausage into pieces and fry. I like to fry the sausage for a bit because I think it improved its taste. Add to the pot. Strain the fat from bacon before adding it.

Also add paprika (sladká červená paprika) and red pepper (štiplavá červená paprika). I used 3 spoons of whole red pepper and 1 spoon of powder.

Add more water if you need to. Roughly speaking, the soup should be half liquid, half “stuff”. Cover and cook for additional 30 minutes.

Finally, take the sour cream (kyslá smotana) and mix in few tablespoons of flour (múka). Add in small batches, stirring in between and letting the cream dissolve.

Finally, boil for another minute or two. Also scoop out as many bones as possible. Manually pull off whatever meat didn’t fall off.

And there you have it, the traditional Slovak sauerkraut soup, kapustnica. Besides the soup, I also prepared whiskey “rum” balls. Dobrú chuť a Veselé Vianoce (Bon apetit and Merry Christmas)!

Here are just few other pictures I wanted to share. The day when I was making this soup was the first time it had snowed here in Washington, D.C., this winter. And it was quite the snowfall! The snow created a beautiful backdrop for preparing this traditional winter soup. Here is a photo taken out the backdoor in my kitchen. Cooking is also a great time to let your friends try your creation. Here is my friend Nicole tasting (and testing) the soup. I think she approved. And finally, me serving the soup at the Slovak Embassy.

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