Central Europe · Volume 17, The Herring Fleet and the Sausage Stand
Currywurst
Berlin (contested; also claimed by Hamburg and the Ruhr)
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- Not statedNo source states a time and the atlas has too few comparable dishes to estimate one.
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
This chapter does not claim to reproduce Herta Heuwer's original 1949 sauce; she destroyed her written recipe before her death in 1999, and no source consulted has recovered it. What follows is a considered, well balanced contemporary reconstruction of the kind German home cooks make today, built on the same principle her sauce is known to have used, a genuine tomato reduction carrying curry spice, rather than bottled ketchup doctored with curry powder, which is the failure mode of nearly every bad export version of this dish.
As tradition built it
Serves 4.
Ingredients
- 500ml good tomato ketchup
- 2 tbsp tomato purée
- 1 small onion, very finely diced
- 2 tbsp cider vinegar
- 2 tbsp soft brown sugar
- 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
- 1 tbsp curry powder, plus extra to finish
- 1/2 tsp smoked paprika, rounded
- a pinch a pinch of cayenne
- 1 tsp mustard
- a splash a splash of stock or water, to loosen
- 4 Bratwurst or Bockwurst, sliced, to fry and serve
Method
- Soften the onion gently in a little oil until translucent but not coloured, add the tomato purée and cook it out for a minute to lose its rawness.
- Add the tomato ketchup, cider vinegar, soft brown sugar, Worcestershire sauce, smoked paprika, cayenne and mustard, loosening with a splash of stock or water, and simmer for 15 minutes, stirring, until the sauce has thickened slightly and the raw vinegar edge has cooked away.
- Blitz smooth if a glossy, clinging finish is wanted.
- Fry sliced Bratwurst or Bockwurst in a hot pan until well coloured, slice, and pour the warm sauce generously over, finishing with an extra dusting of curry powder, the traditional final flourish.
What a modern chef changes
Roasted-tomato sauce, freshly ground whole spice, and an in-house sausage seared on the Egg
Method
- The sauce is built from fresh, oven-roasted tomatoes rather than bottled ketchup as its base, roasted at 180°C for 40 minutes with a little sugar and oil to concentrate their sweetness before being passed through a chinois to remove skin and seed, giving a genuinely fresh tomato depth no bottled product can match.
- The curry spice is not added as commercial powder but built from individually toasted and freshly ground whole spices, cumin, coriander, turmeric, fenugreek and a little dried chilli, toasted in a dry pan until fragrant then ground to order, a direct application of this cuisine's own spice-grinder-and-fresh-toasting logic rather than a shop-bought shortcut.
- The sausage itself is made in-house from a coarse pork mince, seasoned simply with salt, white pepper and a touch of mace, stuffed into natural casing and poached gently before a final hard sear on the Big Green Egg for genuine char rather than a pan-fry, giving a smokier, more textured result than the traditional version.
- The sauce is finished, just before serving, with a spoon of the sausage's own rendered fat whisked through, tying the two elements together rather than leaving the sauce sitting on top as a separate condiment.