Name: Choucroute Garnie
Prep time: 30 min
Cook time: 2 h
Total time: 2 h 30 min
Yield: 8 servings
Cuisine: French
Ingredients: 1.5 kg jarred sauerkraut; 150 g goose fat or lard; 2 onions, sliced; 500 ml dry riesling; 300 ml chicken stock; 15 juniper berries; 6 cloves; 3 bay leaves; 1 tbsp black peppercorns; 1 tsp caraway seeds; 1 smoked pork hock, about 800 g; 400 g smoked pork belly in one piece; 6 Alsace sausages or frankfurters; 4 Toulouse sausages; 8 waxy potatoes, boiled; Strong mustard

Choucroute Garnie

Sauerkraut cooked in riesling with a collection of pork and sausages piled on top. Alsace, and the sauerkraut should be rinsed before it goes near the pot.

2 hr 30 min total Serves 8 servings Medium

Don't Make These Mistakes

Rinse and squeeze the kraut. Straight from the jar it is inedible in quantity.

Meats by cooking time. Boiled sausage is a sad thing.

A muslin bag for the spices, or you eat juniper berries whole.

Choucroute Garnie, in preparation
Photograph credit: Chicken sausage, sauerkraut, and fried potatoes - Massachusetts by Daderot · CC0 · Wikimedia Commons

Making Choucroute Garnie

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Tip the sauerkraut into a colander and rinse it thoroughly under cold running water, then squeeze it out hard in handfuls.
Melt the fat and soften the onions 10 minutes. Tie the juniper, cloves, bay, peppercorns and caraway in a muslin bag.
Add the sauerkraut, wine, stock and spice bag, and bury the hock and pork belly in it.
Cover and cook at a bare simmer, or in a 160°C / 320°F oven, for 90 minutes.
Brown the Toulouse sausages in a separate pan and add them to the pot.
Cook 20 minutes more, adding the Alsace sausages for the last 10 minutes only — they need warming, not cooking.
Pile the sauerkraut on a warm platter with the meats sliced over it, the boiled potatoes around, and mustard on the table.

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What's Going On Here

Rinsing the sauerkraut is what makes this palatable rather than punishing. Jarred kraut is packed in a brine far too sour to eat in quantity, and a rinse and a squeeze brings it back to something that can absorb the wine and fat over two hours. The meats go in by cooking time — smoked hock early, sausages in the last twenty minutes — because boiled sausage is a poor thing and they only need heating through.

Leftovers, Reheating and Keeping

Refrigerated for 4 days and better reheated. The sauerkraut base freezes for 3 months; the sausages do not.

Good With

Boiled potatoes
Strong mustard
The rest of the riesling

Sides from the same cuisine on this site: Provençal Ratatouille, Brioche Loaf, French Baguette.

Nutrition per Serving

No nutrition figures are given for this recipe: they cannot be worked out reliably from its ingredient list (some ingredient lines cannot be read). Why some recipes have none.

Dairy-Free Gluten-Free No Added Sugar