Rheinischer Sauerbraten

Name: Rheinischer Sauerbraten
Total time: 123 h
Yield: Serves a family
Cuisine: The Rhine and the German Middle
Ingredients: 1kg beef for braising, one piece; 500ml water; 250ml red wine vinegar; 3 onions; 1 carrot; 2 bay leaves; 5 cloves; 10 peppercorns; 10 juniper berries; 200g raisins, soaked well; 1 tbsp Rübenkraut or Apfelkraut; 1 to 2 Aachener Printen, crumbled; 100g lard or oil, for browning

The Rhineland

Rheinischer Sauerbraten, beef cured for days in spiced vinegar, braised, with a raisin and gingerbread sauce: thick slices of dark braised beef fanned on a plate under a glossy brown sauce flecked with raisins, two pale potato dumplings beside and a spoon of apple compote.

Illustration

Time: 123 hours

Researched: Researched from 1 source in the brief

The Rhenish sour roast. The marinade is the dish and the days are the method: three to five in the cold for beef, six for horse in one account, the meat turned. The sauce is sweetened with raisins soaked beforehand and cooked with the roast, with Rübenkraut or Apfelkraut, and thickened with Aachener Printen. The weights are the Cologne city portal's, for a kilo of beef, and the braise runs until the meat is tender.

The Rhineland

The story every Rhineland recipe page tells is that Julius Caesar's army, marching through Bonn, Cologne and Aachen, saved meat that the heat had spoiled by steeping it in vinegar, with raisins brought up from Tuscany. It is a legend and we write it as one; nothing in the research is a document for it. What the sources do agree on is the horse. The Rhenish sauerbraten was made from horse, old work animals whose tough meat needed days in the marinade, and beef took over as the horse butchers disappeared. The disappearance can be watched on the ground: Gertrud Horst and her husband ran Cologne's only right bank horse butcher's, on Lohmühlenstraße in Mülheim, from the early 1980s until it closed in 2018, and by September 2019 Mülheim's horse butcher tradition was over, as the district's own pages recorded it. One report says a few butchers still sold about five hundred sauerbraten a week, nearly all to private tables, and that restaurants rarely serve the horse version; the food magazine Essen und Trinken still publishes a recipe for Rheinischer Sauerbraten vom Pferd. So: horse is the older meat, beef is the modern default, and the dating of the shift, which centuries and why, was not established by this research. The "poor man's meat" framing is plausible and unsourced.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves a family. 3 to 5 days in the marinade, then about 3 hours to cook.

Ingredients

1kg beef for braising, one piece
500ml water
250ml red wine vinegar
3 onions
1 carrot
2 bay leaves
5 cloves
10 peppercorns
10 juniper berries
200g raisins, soaked well
1 tbsp Rübenkraut or Apfelkraut
1 to 2 Aachener Printen, crumbled
100g lard or oil, for browning

Method

Boil the water and vinegar with the onions, the carrot and the whole spice, bay, cloves, peppercorns and juniper, and let the marinade go fully cold.
Put the beef for braising in the marinade, covered, in the cold, for 3 to 5 days, turning it several times.
Put the raisins to soak. Lift the meat out, dry it, and brown it in lard or oil on every side. Add the marinade's vegetables and some of its liquid.
Braise, covered, at a low simmer until the meat is tender, about 3 hours, adding marinade as it reduces.
Lift out the meat. Strain the liquid, return it to the pot with the soaked raisins and the Rübenkraut or Apfelkraut, and crumble in Printen until the sauce thickens.
Slice the meat against the grain and serve it in the sauce, with potato dumplings and apple compote or red cabbage.

What a modern chef changes

The cure measured, the sauce built from the marinade

Rung 1

Method

Weigh the marinade: one part vinegar to two of water is the usual ratio, and a 5 per cent wine vinegar at that dilution gives the acid that cures without cooking the surface grey. Bag the meat with the cold marinade and hold it at 3 degrees for four days; the bag keeps every face in contact.
Brown the meat hard in a dry pan before it goes to an 80 degree sous vide bath for 12 hours, then finish it in the strained marinade reduced by half with the raisins and syrup. The gingerbread goes in at the end, off the heat, so the spice does not stew.
Keep a spoon of the raw marinade back and whisk it into the finished sauce; a sauerbraten whose sauce is only sweet has lost the dish.
Horse, where a butcher has it and the cook wants the older dish, takes six days in the cure and the same cooking.

Open in the atlas: cook mode, scaling and tick off lists