Eisbein mit Sauerkraut

As tradition built it

Serves 4. 1 hour 30 minutes to 2 hours to cook, or longer for a larger knuckle.

Ingredients

• 1 large salt-cured pork knuckle, per your butcher's own cure or brined at home for 5 days in a 6 percent salt solution with bay and juniper
• 1 bunch soup vegetables, carrot, leek, celeriac
• 1 onion, studded with cloves
• 1, a few, to taste a bay leaf, juniper berries, black peppercorns
• 800g sauerkraut
• 1 glass of white wine
• 1 spoon of goose fat

Method

1. Place the knuckle in a large pot with the vegetables, bay leaf, juniper berries and black peppercorns, cover generously with water, bring to a bare simmer and cook gently for 90 minutes to 2 hours, until the meat pulls easily from the bone, topping up the water as needed.
2. Separately, soften a diced onion in goose fat, deglaze with the white wine, then add the sauerkraut and simmer for 20 minutes, moistened with a ladle of the knuckle's own cooking liquor.
3. Serve the knuckle whole or carved, on a bed of the sauerkraut, with boiled potatoes and mustard.

What a modern chef changes

Sous vide knuckle finished hard for crisp skin, and a butter-mounted reduction

Method

1. The knuckle is cured for the same 5 days but then cooked sous vide at 72°C for 24 hours rather than simmered, giving an evenly tender result edge to edge with none of the toughening risk a long stovetop simmer carries if the pot ever runs dry, then finished under a very hot grill or on the Big Green Egg for a genuinely crisp, blistered skin the traditional boiled version never achieves.
2. The sauerkraut is not simmered soft but warmed only briefly, just enough to take the raw edge off while keeping real acidity and crunch, a deliberate departure that plays the dish's fat against real texture rather than softness against softness.
3. The cooking liquor from the sous vide bag is reduced hard with a splash more white wine and mounted with butter into a small, glossy sauce, replacing the traditional plain cooking liquor moistening the kraut with something built and finished with intention.
4. Juniper is toasted and freshly cracked over the dish at the pass, rather than only simmered inside it, giving a top note of the aromatic the long cook otherwise mutes.