Käsekrainer
Viennese sausage created in the 1960s, studded with cubes of cheese that melt in cooking and form runny pockets. A product of the würstelstände, Vienna’s night-time street stands.
| Lean pork (shoulder) | 600 g |
| Back fat | 250 g |
| Hard cheese in 5 to 7 mm cubes (Emmental or Gouda) | 150 g |
| Curing salt | 20 g |
| Ground white pepper | 2 g |
| Fresh garlic, crushed | 5 g |
| Grated nutmeg | 1 g |
| Dried marjoram | 2 g |
| Iced water | 80 ml |
| Hog casing (Ø 28–32 mm) | — |
- Preparation: Cut the meats into cubes. Part-freeze. Cut the cheese into regular 5 mm cubes and refrigerate.
- Mincing: Mince the meats finely in a bowl cutter, incorporating the iced water to obtain a smooth emulsion.
- Seasoning: Add the curing salt, the garlic and the spices. The forcemeat must be very cold (< 10 °C) before the cheese goes in.
- Adding the cheese: Fold the cold cheese cubes gently into the forcemeat by hand. Do not process; the cubes must remain whole and visible.
- Stuffing: Stuff gently so as not to crush the cheese cubes. Form sausages of 15 to 18 cm.
- Resting: Refrigerate for 12 hours.
- Smoking: Hot smoke (70–75 °C) over beech wood for 1 to 2 hours until golden.
- Poaching: Poach for 15 to 20 minutes at 75 °C.
- Serving: Grill or pan-fry until the cheese begins to seep. Serve with bread and strong mustard (Kremser Senf).
The käsekrainer is a recent product. Its name literally means ‘Carniolan sausage with cheese ’, referring to the Slovenian kranjska klobasa, a variant developed at the end of the 1960s in Upper Austria. It holds no geographical protection.
Its documented origin lies in the Viennese würstelstand. This network of street stands dates back to the nineteenth century, when the municipality of Vienna began granting itinerant sausage-selling concessions to war-wounded and invalids, a social-assistance measure that created points of sale that gradually became fixed. These stands became neighbourhood fixtures, handed down from generation to generation. Around two hundred survive in Vienna today, open late into the evening and often all night. Helmut Qualtinger, a figure in Austrian satire, saw in them a symbol of social equality, noting that they were among the few places where people of different backgrounds rubbed shoulders on equal terms.
The central technical constraint concerns the cheese cubes. Cubes too small melt entirely into the forcemeat during smoking and disappear; cubes too large run prematurely before the forcemeat has set. The acceptable window is held to lie between 5 and 7 mm. The cubes are folded in by hand into a forcemeat kept below 10 °C, and the sausage is then refrigerated before smoking to fix their position within the mass. At the final grilling, the cheese seeps through the pores of the casing, a phenomenon the Viennese call der Käse weint, the cheese weeps.
The käsekrainer is the most-ordered sausage at the würstelstände of Vienna. The other sausages offered at these stands include the Frankfurter, the bratwurst and the krainer, which is the cheeseless version. The distinction between these products is well established among the regular clientele. No codified regional variant exists outside the Viennese setting.
It is eaten standing, with a sliced semmel (the traditional white bread roll), strong mustard (Kremser Senf) and a gherkin, without plate or cutlery. This mode of service is common to all the sausages of the würstelstände.
The käsekrainer remains an essentially Viennese product, little distributed outside Austria in its original form. Imitations are produced in other European countries under various names, but without a documented link to the Viennese version. Its international renown remains confined to culinary tourism.
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