The Nordics and the Baltic · Volume 25, Rye, Manor and the Fast Night Table
Verivorst
Estonia
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 2 hours
- Researched
- No outside sources linked
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Estonia, tied to the household Christmas pig slaughter.
As tradition built it
Makes enough for a household batch, about 10 metres of sausage. About 2 hours, including cooking the barley and simmering the sausage.
Ingredients
- 2.5 litres water
- 1 litre fresh pig's blood
- 1 kg barley groats
- 500 g smoked fatback
- 300 g onion
- 2 tbsp butter
- to taste salt, pepper, allspice and marjoram, to taste
- roughly 10 metres pig-intestine casing, roughly 10 metres
- to serve lingonberry preserve and boiled potato, to serve
Method
- Cook the barley groats in the water until tender.
- Soften the onion in the butter.
- While the barley is still warm, work in the blood, the softened onion, the smoked fatback and the seasoning (salt, pepper, allspice and marjoram).
- Stuff the mixture loosely into the pig-intestine casing, leaving room for expansion.
- Simmer gently, never at a hard boil, until firm.
- Serve across Christmas Eve and Christmas Day (jõulureede, "Christmas Friday", being the day the pig is killed) with lingonberry preserve and boiled potato.
What a modern chef changes
A controlled sous vide finish, held cracklings and a lingonberry gastrique
Rung 1
Method
- Hold the stuffed sausage in a sous vide bath at 75°C until the centre reaches a safe, custard-set 68 to 70°C, removing the casing-splitting risk of a rolling boil.
- Render the fatback separately and reserve a portion of the crisp cracklings to scatter over the finished sausage, rather than rendering it all into the mix.
- Finish under a very hot grill or a torch for thirty seconds a side, for a genuine casing snap.
- Serve with a quick-pickled lingonberry gastrique, reduced with a little of the sausage's own cooking liquid.