Grünkohl mit Pinkel

As tradition built it

Serves 6. About 1 hour 30 minutes to cook, the Pinkel sausages added for the final 20 minutes.

Ingredients

• 1.5kg curly kale, stripped from its tough stems and roughly chopped
• 4 Pinkel sausages (or a home-made version, see the ferment bench)
• 500g Kassler or another smoked pork cut
• 2 onions, diced
• 500g floury potatoes
• a spoonful, if needed oats or pinhead groats, to thicken if the braise runs thin
• to taste salt, black pepper, a little sugar to round the kale's bitterness
• a knob goose fat or pork lard, to start the onions

Method

1. Soften the onions in goose fat or pork lard, then add the kale in batches until it wilts down.
2. Add the Kassler and enough stock or water to just cover, and simmer gently for at least an hour and a half, until the kale has broken down soft and the smoked meat's fat has worked its way through the whole pot, stirring in oats or pinhead groats if the braise runs thin and seasoning with salt, black pepper and a little sugar to round the kale's bitterness.
3. Add the Pinkel sausages for the final 20 minutes only, so they warm through and release fat into the braise without falling apart.
4. Serve with boiled potatoes and a spoon of mustard, the traditional accompaniment to a dish built entirely around smoke, fat and bitterness.

What a modern chef changes

Sous vide brined shoulder, blanched kale and a monté sauce

Method

1. The Kassler is replaced with a pork shoulder, brined for 48 hours in a 5 percent salt cure with juniper and bay to approximate Kassler's own curing without buying a pre-cured cut, then cooked sous vide at 68°C for 24 hours before a hard sear to render and crisp the skin.
2. The kale is blanched for 90 seconds and shocked in iced water before it ever meets the pot, fixing its colour a bright, deep green rather than the traditional grey-green of a long-braised leaf, then finished in the braising liquid for only 15 minutes at the end, keeping some bite against the soft meat.
3. The Pinkel is home-made using the ferment-bench method, with the groat-to-fat ratio adjusted slightly leaner so it renders cleanly rather than heavily into the finished dish.
4. The braising liquid itself is reduced separately, strained through a chinois, and finished with a spoon of the smoked pork's own fat monté through it just before serving, so the sauce carries the whole dish's smoke and richness in a controlled, glossy finish rather than a thin, cloudy braising liquor.