Steffen's Dinners - Recipes and Photos

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Münchner Weißwurst ("Munich-style White Sausage") is a German specialty from Bavaria. It's made from veal, pork and pork skin and is often served with Krautsalat (German-style cole slaw), pretzels and a special sweet mustard ("Weißwurstsenf").

This recipe shows you how to make homemade Weißwurst from the basic ingredients. It requires a large and powerful food processor, a kitchen scale, a thermometer, a meat grinder, sausage casings (hog), ice and a sausage stuffer.

The ingredients listed below yield 2kg of sausage stuffing, this will make 16 sausages, 125g each.

Ingredients

• 36g / 1.2 oz salt
• 600g / 1 lb 4 oz lean veal meat ("veal stew meat") at refrigerator temperature, cut into 1cm / ½ in cubes
• 300g / 10 oz lean pork meat, cut into 1cm / ½ in cubes, partially frozen
• 400g / 13 oz pork fat (pork belly without the skin, etc.) at refrigerator temperature, cut into 1cm / ½ in cubes
• 300g / 10 oz ice
• 100g / 3 oz pork skin
• 1g / ½ tsp dried lemon peel
• 1g / ¼ tsp MSG (optional)
• 1g / ¼ tsp white pepper
• pinch of dried ginger
• pinch of freshly grated cardamom
• pinch of dried mace
• 10g / 0.3 oz onion (don't chop!)
• 20g / 0.6 oz parsley, chopped
• sausage casings (hog)

Preparation

1. Prepare casings per instructions (soak in warm water until pliable, rinse outside and inside). Set aside.
2. Bring 1l / 1 quart of water to a boil. Simmer pork skin and onion for ca. 15 minutes. Remove from water, run through meat grinder, set aside.
3. Combine lean meat (pork, veal), spices, salt and half of the ice. Blend in the food processor until you have a smooth farce. Set aside, refrigerate.
4. Blend pork fat in the food processor until smooth
5. Blend in lean meat farce.
6. Blend in remaining ice until the mixture is smooth and no ice clumps remain.
7. With the food processor mix in ground pork skin and parsley, blend just enough to distribute evenly.
8. Stuff 16 sausages using a sausage stuffer or a sausage stuffing attachment. Do not overstuff, when twisting the links, leave a little room for expansion in each link. If necessary, remove large air bubbles by piercing the casing with a skewer. Tie off the links.
9. In a large stock pot heat up water to 80°C / 175°F. Check with thermometer.
10. Place sausages in hot water, leave in for 30 minutes, adjust heat to keep temperature constant at 80°C. Check with thermometer.
11. Remove from hot water, place in cold water to cool. Refrigerate until ready to serve.
12. To serve, heat up with some fresh parsley in hot beef stock (or salted water). Do not boil.
13. Serve with fresh pretzels and sweet mustard ("Weißwurstsenf"). Update: As Bart points out in his comment, Krautsalat is not a traditional side dish.

Notes

• You need a powerful food processor to prepare the stuffing in large batches. My 14-cup model with a direct drive works just fine. Be careful with smaller models with belt drives, they may not be powerful and sturdy enough and you may break the drive belt (I did that some 5 years ago)! If you have one of these, run the meat through a meat grinder first and process only very small batches.
• For best results, use a dedicated sausage stuffer. Meat grinder attachments have the tendency to warm up the stuffing which may cause the fat-water emulsion to separate.
• I buy my casings from Allied Kenco Sales, but there are many other sources for casings and stuffing equipment.

I adapted this recipe for home use from a recipe in , a book with sausage recipes for professional butchers. I can't recommend this book for general home use, since it is very expensive and the recipes do not contain detailed lists of spices (they refer to premixed sausage spices instead).