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Sauerkraut - Choucroute garnie

Choucroute garnie (French for dressed sauerkraut) is a famous Alsatian recipe for preparing sauerkraut with potatoes, sausages and other salted meats.

Although sauerkraut is a traditionally German and Eastern Europeean dish, the French annexation of Alsace and Lorraine following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 brought this dish to the attention of French chefs and it has since been widely adopted in France.

In principle, there is no fixed recipe for this dish - any preparation of hot sauerkraut with meat and potatoes could qualify - but in practice there are certain traditions, favourite recipes, and stereotypical garnishes that are more easily called choucroute garnie than others.

Traditional recipes call for three types of sausage: Frankfurt sausages, Strasbourg sausages, and Montbéliard sausages. Fatty, inexpensive or salted cuts of pork also often form a part of choucroute garnie, including ham hocks, pork knuckles and shoulders, back bacon and slices of salt pork.

Other recipes call for fish or goose meat, but this is far less typical.

The sauerkraut itself is usually heated with a glass of Riesling or other dry white wines or stock, and goose or pork fat. In some recipes, it may also be cooked with chopped onion and sliced apples.

The simplicity of this dish, its clear tastes and continuing popularity, and the fact that its most common ingredients are plentiful and easily preserved, has in recent years made choucroute garnie a dish often purchased at supermarkets in a microwavable ready-to-eat form.

Here's an easy recipe forsauerkraut with sausages, salt pork and potatoes

To make a very yummy choucroute garnie, you will need:

Note: Being a little picky about your ingredients (especially the sauerkraut) with this recipe makes all the difference.

Ingredients

• 1 or so tablespoons of duck fat
• 1 medium onion, finely chopped
• 2 or 3 small potatoes
• 5 juniper berries
• 1 clove
• 1 or 2 garlic cloves
• 1 or so tablespoons of coriander seed
• 1/2 tablespoon black mustard seed
• 2 strips of bacon, sliced (or the same amount of salted pork belly) into rough squares
• 1 pound of sauerkraut
• 4 pork sausages
• 3 smoked pork slices, bone in
• 1 cup or so of white wine (dry)

Procedure

1. In a pot large enough to in the end hold everything, melt the duck fat over medium heat.
2. When hot, add the onions and sautee until transclucent (about five minutes or so).
3. Then, add the sauerkraut, white wine, juniper berries, clove, coriander seed, mustard seed, and garlic.
4. Add the smoked pork and bacon.
5. Cover, and then simmer for about two hours.
6. In other pot, simmer two peeled potatoes and your sausages (not a boil, or your sausages will split open).
7. Simmer until potatoes are done (and by then the sausage will be, too).

How to Serve :

Serve in a heap-- sauerkraut at the bottom, various pig and potato parts on top. This is delicious.

Credits : This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the
 Wikipedia article "Choucroute garnie"

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