Vėdarai
Lithuanian sausage whose principal ingredient is neither meat nor blood, but raw grated potato. Stuffed into a large casing with fat, roasted in the oven until the crust is golden, served with sour cream.
| Raw potatoes, peeled and finely grated | 700 g |
| Pork fat, in small dice | 150 g |
| Smoked bacon lardons, fried | 80 g |
| Onion, finely chopped | 60 g |
| Fine salt | 12 g |
| Ground black pepper | 3 g |
| Dried marjoram | 4 g |
| Wide hog casing (Ø 40–45 mm) | — |
- Preparing the potatoes: Peel and grate the potatoes on the finest grater. Squeeze in a clean cloth to extract the excess liquid. Keep the liquid for a few minutes: the starch settles to the bottom. Discard the water, recover the starch, then work it back into the grated potatoes.
- Preparing the lardons: Fry the smoked lardons with the chopped onion in a pan over medium heat until golden. Set aside with the cooking fat.
- Mixing: In a large bowl, combine the grated potatoes, the raw diced fat, the fried lardons with their fat, the salt, the pepper and the marjoram. Mix to a homogeneous filling.
- Stuffing: Rinse the hog casings in cold water. Stuff the filling without packing too tightly (the potatoes swell in cooking) to form sausages 15 to 20 cm long. Close each end with twine.
- Poaching: Plunge the sausages into a large pot of lightly salted, barely simmering water. Poach at 80 °C for 30 to 40 minutes. The sausages are ready when they rise to the surface and are firm to the touch.
- Oven cooking: Arrange the poached sausages in a greased oven dish. Brush with melted butter or bacon fat. Roast at 190 °C for 30 to 40 minutes, turning halfway, until the skin is evenly golden and crisp.
- Serving: Serve hot, cut into lengths, with a spoonful of soured cream (grietinė) and crumbled spirgučiai (crisp lardons) on top.
The vėdarai (plural of vėdaras) are among the rare sausages of Europe whose principal ingredient is neither meat nor blood but a root vegetable. The term vėdaras designates both the casing (in the literal sense, the intestine) and the preparation itself. Two types exist: the bulviniai vėdarai (with potato, the subject of this entry) and the kraujiniai vėdarai (with blood and barley, close to the Estonian verivorst and the Polish kaszanka).
The appearance of the potato vėdarai is bound to the spread of the potato in Lithuania, which became general only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Before that date, the vėdarai were cereal puddings of barley or buckwheat. The potato, cheaper than grain, allowed Lithuanian peasants to produce a nourishing sausage from an abundant ingredient. The shift from grain to potato transformed the texture of the product: the potato vėdaras has a creamy, melting interior, whereas the cereal puddings are grainy.
The central technical point concerns the treatment of the raw potato. Very fine grating releases water and starch; wringing in a cloth removes the excess water, but the starch recovered at the bottom of the liquid is worked back into the filling, for it is what ensures the bind in cooking. Without this step, the filling would fall apart in the casing during poaching. Marjoram is an aromatic herb common throughout Baltic charcuterie and is accordingly found in the vėdaras.
The vėdarai are present throughout Lithuania, with modest regional variations. In Aukštaitija (the north-east), the proportion of fat is higher and the marjoram more generous. In Žemaitija (Samogitia, the north-west), some versions mix barley groats into the potato. Related preparations exist in neighbouring countries: the Polish kiszka ziemniaczana (particularly in Podlasie and the Suwałki region on the border), the Belarusian bulbianaja kishka, and the German kartoffelwurst, which, however, use cooked rather than raw potatoes.
The vėdarai are traditionally eaten at family winter meals, with soured cream (grietinė) and spirgučiai (crumbled grilled lardons). They appear at festive meals, notably at Christmas and at the kūčios (the Lithuanian Christmas Eve supper), where they stand alongside other potato dishes such as the kugelis (potato bake) and the cepelinai (stuffed dumplings). The potato is the connecting thread of Lithuanian cooking, and the vėdaras is its charcuterie expression.
The vėdarai have seen a revival of interest in Lithuania since the 2000s. Several Vilnius restaurants list them as dishes of the heritage cuisine, sometimes in modernised versions (the filling enriched with mushrooms, buckwheat or fresh curd). The Lithuanian diaspora of Chicago, the largest outside Europe, keeps the tradition alive in the Lithuanian restaurants and grocers of the Marquette Park district. The vėdarai are not known outside the Lithuanian and Baltic communities.
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