By Jesse Raub
Links to the Past & Present I’m sitting on the patio of a brewery as the sun is setting just over my shoulder, and to prepare for my interview I arrange a variety of meat sticks on a cutting board that I brought from home. As I take a sip from my thematically appropriate German lager, my subject pulls up a chair and jumps right in. “That’s the thing,” he says to me, pointing at the sausages I have laid out on the table. “They all use hickory, but it comes out in so many different ways with landjäger.” The “he” in this situation is Jesse Brookstein—a local landjäger enthusiast (and parttime distributor) who literally wrote the book on landjäger—and we’ve got five different varieties in front of us at Working Draft Brewery. We’ve been snipping off small bits with a pair of kitchen shears, and I sample the pfefferjäger from Bavaria Sausage—it’s spicy, tangy, salty and has a mild heat that sneaks up on you (“They use a blend of Brazilian peppers,” Brookstein says). I’m entranced by the complexity of its flavors, but before we can even talk about the other types on display, a woman at the next table pipes up. “Is that sausage?” she calls out. When I tell her we are sampling landjäger, she gasps. “I love landjäger!” As her group gets up for another beer, Brookstein strikes up a conversation with a guy from her table who, as it turns out, also knows the Ruefs—one of the families that used to run a meat shop that made landjäger.
“That’s why I love this stuff,” Brookstein says to me. “It brings people together.” Landjäger is a type of sausage that’s been cured, fermented, smoked and dried. It’s typically made with a blend of beef and pork along with a mix of spices that could include caraway, coriander, black pepper, allspice, celery seed, garlic, cumin and nutmeg that all gets stuffed into a casing and molded into a rectangular shape. Most landjäger comes in a pair strung together by a bit of casing that’s been twisted, which is then usually hung over a wooden dowel in decorative displays that look like Alpine chalets. And here’s the kicker—landjäger is shelf-stable, which means it can be left out for up to two weeks without spoiling (or if refrigerated in a sealed package, up to a year). The curing process helps stabilize the water activity in the sausage while the fermentation (usually from a lactic acid starter culture) lowers the pH until it’s slightly acidic. Finally, the smoking process kills off any remaining harmful bacteria. In pre-refrigeration times, these steps were important for preserving meat: Landjäger would typically be taken
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• WINTER 2023