Smoked Sausage with Accompaniments

 

Smoked pork and beef sausage; parsley potatoes; pickled beet salad; with house made sauerkraut and coarse ground mustard from black mustard seed. 

This dish combines many flavors that I really enjoy.  I like the fact that most of the items on the plate were made in house.

In normal times even the sausage would have been house made.  But, with refrigerator failures and supply chain issues, these are not normal times.

The parley potatoes were the norm.  Boiled red potatoes tossed with whole butter and house dried parsley.

The beet salad was my mother in laws recipe.  Even I don’t know it!  Perhaps one day I will be cleared for this knowledge! 

The sauerkraut on the other hand, I can tell you about.  This was a raw sauerkraut in the sense that it had not been canned or cooked prior to this meal.

Sauerkraut uses a lacto fermentation process.  Shredded green cabbage is mixed with salt and allowed to sit (ferment) at room temperature, until you are satisfied with the flavor.

In other climates they have root cellars.  Root cellars don’t exist in my part of Texas.

I write this because the temperature affects the fermentation time.  The warmer it is the faster the fermentation time.

When I am satisfied with the flavor of my sauerkraut, I bag it up in zip lock style bags and place it in the refrigerator.  Refrigerating the sauerkraut does not stop the fermentation process.  It just slows it down.

When sauerkraut is made commercially, it is cooked or “canned”.  The canning process stops fermentation by effectively killing the anaerobic bacteria that is responsible for fermentation.

To prepare the sauerkraut for this dish, it was combined with white wine and juniper barriers and simmered.  Even after simmering for twenty minutes, it had a it had a delightful crunch. 

The last ten minutes of so of the simmer time, the sausage was introduced to the pan and allowed to heat through. This allowed the flavors of the sausage and the sauerkraut to marry well.

This takes us the coarse ground mustard.  I wrote up the process for making this mustard on April 4, 2022.  The article can be found here: Dijon Style Mustard with Black Mustard Seed.

There is not much else to say about this dish except that it was very delightful in many ways.  I am very pleased with the photo too!

#LifeLongLearning #LifeLongTeaching #FamilyFood #Sauerkraut #DijonStyleMustard #SmokedSausage #PickledBeetSalad #ParsleyPotatoes

 

 

As always, your questions or comments are welcome.

Until next time, Bon Appetit Y’all!

Leslie Bartosh