Kranjska Klobasa
Sausage of Carniola, protected by a European PGI. Sold in Vienna from 1896 under the name of krainerwurst, it has since been the object of a naming dispute between Slovenia and Austria.
| Lean pork (leg or shoulder) | 680 g |
| Firm back fat | 320 g |
| Fine salt | 20 g |
| Fresh garlic, crushed | 5 g |
| Ground black pepper | 3 g |
| Cold water | 40 ml |
| Hog casing (Ø 32–36 mm) | — |
- Tradition: Use only pork of superior quality.
- Preparation: Cut the meat into strips and the fat into 1 cm cubes (which must remain visible in the finished product). Chill.
- Mincing: Mince the meat through the 8 mm plate. Add the fat cubes without mincing them.
- Seasoning: Mix with the salt, the garlic, the pepper and the water. The seasoning is deliberately simple to set off the quality of the meat.
- Stuffing: Stuff in pairs of 12 to 14 cm each, joined at the middle. Target weight: 80–100 g per sausage.
- Smoking: Cold smoke over beech wood for 4 to 6 hours, at between 25 and 30 °C.
- Poaching: Poach in water at 75 °C for 20 to 25 minutes.
- Serving: Serve hot with grated horseradish, mustard and bread.
The kranjska klobasa takes its name from the Kranjska (Carniola), the historical region corresponding roughly to present-day Slovenia, a province of the Habsburg Empire for centuries. It is mentioned as early as 1896 in Süddeutsche Küche, Katharina Prato’s cookbook, under the name of krainerwurst, when it was sold on the markets of Vienna and Graz as an imported regional speciality.
The sobriety of the seasoning, limited to salt, garlic and pepper, is imposed by the PGI specification. The fat cubes visible at the cut are a requirement of the same specification: their presence attests a careful incorporation that fine industrial mincing cannot reproduce.
Its PGI, obtained in 2015, was the subject of a lengthy procedure, with Austria and Croatia both contesting the recipe's paternity. The Austrians relied on the krainerwurst, documented from 1896; the Croats claimed an identical Kranjska kobasica produced in Slavonia. The European Commission ruled in favour of Slovenia. The Austrian krainerwurst continues to be produced and sold without restriction in third countries outside the European Union. It is served hot with grated horseradish, mustard and bread, and accompanied by sauerkraut or potatoes. The Viennese käsekrainer, a sausage into which dice of hard cheese have been worked, is a variant developed at the end of the 1960s in Upper Austria, directly derived from the kranjska klobasa.
Its spread beyond Slovenia is driven by proximity to Austria, where it is eaten as krainer, and by Slovenian communities in Europe and North America.
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