The 'farmer's feast', a groaning one-plate banquet that stands as the emblem of Tyrolean and South Tyrolean mountain-hut cooking. It gathers the winter larder of a German-speaking farmstead onto a single platter: smoked and salt-cured pork, boiled sausages, a bed of sauerkraut braised with onion, caraway and white wine, boiled potatoes, and bread dumplings to soak up the juices. Frankly Austro-Bavarian in derivation, it is hearty peasant abundance served in the mountain huts across the province.
The Bauernschmaus — the word means 'farmer's banquet' — belongs to the shared Austro-Bavarian table, known across Austrian cooking and the southeast of German-speaking Europe. South Tyrol lay within Austria-Hungary until 1919, and the dish took root here through those centuries of Habsburg ties. It is rural by name and by origin, built to feed a crowd from the meats a farm cured after the winter slaughter, and it sits in the same family as the Alsatian choucroute garnie and the Bernese Berner Platte. In the province it is the classic hearty plate of the baite and rifugi, the alpine huts and lodges.
Every forkful is different: silky, smoke-scented pork, a snap of hot sausage, the sharp tang of long-braised sauerkraut, and a soft bread dumpling that has drunk up the salty juices. It is salt, smoke and sour balanced against starchy comfort, food built for cold and appetite.
Almost every element here is a study in preservation. The pork is salt-cured and cold-smoked: salt draws out water and, with the smoke's phenols, holds spoilage at bay while building colour and flavour. The sauerkraut is raw cabbage fermented by lactic-acid bacteria, which turn its sugars into lactic acid — that acidity both preserves it and cuts through the fatty meat. Braising the kraut with onion and a little wine softens its bite, while the bread dumplings act as a sponge, their starch network swelling to soak up the salty, smoky jus that would otherwise run off the plate.
Variations
There is no fixed recipe, only the principle of a generous mixed platter. The meats vary with what a household cured — smoked pork loin or belly, Kaiserfleisch, fresh roast pork, and sausages from frankfurters to bratwurst — and the sauerkraut may be joined by braised turnip kraut. Bread dumplings are the usual starch, though some serve bacon or plain dumplings, or simply boiled potatoes; the Austrian rendering leans the same way, plate for plate.
On the Palate
Where Bauernschmaus sits in the Italian flavor cloud
Ingredients
Serves 4
How it's made
7 steps · 25 min
- 110 min
Rinse the sauerkraut if very sharp and drain. Peel and slice the onion; peel the potatoes.
- 245 min
Braise the sauerkraut: soften the onion in a little lard, add the kraut, caraway and white wine, and cook gently, covered, until mellow, about 45 minutes.
Watch outBraise the sauerkraut gently, covered, the full 45 minutes till it mellows — rushed and hot it stays sharp and raw-tasting instead of soft and rounded.
- 330 min
Simmer the smoked and salt-cured pork in water until heated through and tender; keep it warm in its liquid.
- 420 min
Boil the potatoes until tender and keep them warm.
- 512 min
Poach the sausages gently until hot, taking care not to split the skins.
Watch outPoach the sausages gently, never at a hard boil — a rolling boil splits the skins and they lose their juice into the water.
- 618 min
Steam or simmer the bread dumplings until they float and are cooked through.
Watch outThe dumplings are done the moment they float — that's the steam inside lifting them; fish them out then, before they waterlog and go heavy.
- 75 min
Heap the braised sauerkraut in the centre of a large platter and arrange the sliced pork, sausages, potatoes and dumplings around it; moisten with a little of the cooking juices and serve at once.
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