Käsekrainer

The first Käsekrainer I remember properly was at a Würstelstand near the Naschmarkt, half past eleven on a freezing Tuesday night during my time at GAFA. You stand at a narrow metal counter under fluorescent lights, and the man behind the grill hands you a sausage on a paper plate with a Semmel and a squeeze of mustard. Nothing about the setting suggests you're about to eat one of the best things Vienna has ever produced. Then you bite through the skin and molten Emmental runs down your chin.

Käsekrainer is a smoked pork sausage stuffed with cubes of cheese that melt when the sausage hits the grill. Not shredded cheese mixed into a filling. Cubes. Small ones, five or six millimeters, tucked into the ground pork so they create pockets of melted cheese throughout the sausage. When you cut into it, or when the casing splits on the grill (and it will, if the heat is right), the cheese oozes out in thick golden strings. This is the sausage that has Viennese adults queuing at Würstelstände at midnight in January, breath hanging in the cold air, not a single one of them in a hurry to go home.

Making Käsekrainer from scratch at home is not difficult, but it asks you to work cold and move quickly. The meat, the fat, the grinder, even the bowl should be cold. Warm meat smears instead of grinding cleanly, and smeared fat means greasy sausages instead of juicy ones. Keep everything cold, don't overwork the farce, fold the cheese in gently, and you'll have sausages better than anything you've bought. Gretel always said the best version of anything is the one you made yourself, and she was right about most things.