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To Make Wienerwurst

A sausage made from young beef, pork, salt, spices, and water, formed into casings and dried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

To Make Wienerwurst

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Cut the beef and pork into pieces about the size of a bean.

  2. Mix the meat with salt, saltpetre, sugar, and water.

  3. Press the mixture together and let it rest in a cool place or a heated vessel, depending on the season.

Make the filling

  1. Finely chop the beef, then add the pork, chopped less finely.

  2. Add white pepper, ground coriander, mace, garlic, shallots, and lemon peel to the meat mixture.

  3. Add enough water to achieve a jelly‑like consistency.

  4. Knead the mixture for about 30 minutes to brighten the color and solidify the mass.

Stuff and dry

  1. Fill sheep casings with the mixture, twisting off into sausages weighing about 4 to 5 ounces each.

  2. Hang the sausages on sticks to dry for several hours.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  2. Coriander + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Garlic + shallottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,000 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Coriander + shallottop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together305 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. White pepper + macetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the main lean protein that forms the body and bite of the sausage.
Fat pork
Adds fat that keeps the sausage moist and gives it a tender texture.
Coarse sea salt
Draws out moisture and seasons the meat, helping it bind into a firm mass.
Powdered saltpetre
Helps the meat keep its pink color and adds a cured flavor.
White cane sugar
Balances the salt and rounds out the seasoning of the meat.

The step that matters

Kneading the mixture. Kneading works the meat proteins so the mass becomes sticky and firm, which helps it hold together in the casing. Under-kneading leaves a crumbly sausage that can split or fall apart when dried and cut.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pork, sugar, coriander, mace, garlic, shallot):

  1. Gingerfits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pork, sugar, coriander, mace, garlic, shallot. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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