Festival celebrates culinary secrets of Hungarian sausage
Source: Agencies |
November 1, 2011, Tuesday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
THE annual Bekescsaba Sausage Festival is the place to taste and discover the secrets of Hungary's spicy kolbasz sausages, but strict vegetarians and anyone who sticks to the rule that it is best not to ask how a sausage is made might want to steer clear.
From butchering a pig, complete with blowtorch for searing the bristles, to grinding the meat, mixing it with spices and squeezing it into long, filmy sausage casings, pig to plate is on display with little left to the imagination.
"Any foreigner who ever tasted Hungarian sausage will always ask me: 'Can you please bring me that sausage again?'," said Gyula Bodrogi, a Hungarian actor and member of the jury that judges the best of the day's kolbasz.
And people do love it. The 15th year of the four-day festival in a rural area of southeastern Hungary, near the Romanian border, drew an estimated 100,000 visitors over the end-of-October holiday weekend.
While others celebrated Halloween, many Hungarians and Romanians spent time well-fed at what organizers say is the biggest eating and drinking event in eastern and central Europe - a food--focused flipside to Germany's beer-based Oktoberfest.
People come for the weather, which this year was sunny and mild, for music from local and regional rock and folk bands, for dancing, crafts, amusement park rides, beer, wine and the ever-present, potent and often homemade "palinka" fruit brandy.
But most of all they come for the kolbasz (sausage in Hungarian), made according to a century-old recipe with pork, paprika, garlic, caraway seeds plus various tricks of the trade, available in sizes from finger-shaped to monsters more than a metre long, and ranging in texture from dry to moist and in spiciness from mild to mouth-destroying.
Visitors can also watch and cheer about 500 teams making the kolbasz from scratch, competing in a good-natured, carnival-like, -palinka-fueled atmosphere.
The sausage-making contest provides a focus for the festival, and a chance for one-upmanship among sausage makers.
"Let's do it, guys," said Bence Szabo, 23-year-old team leader of a group of university friends, many of them software programmers in Budapest, as about eight hands in plastic gloves kneaded the contents of a plastic bin containing about 10 kilograms of ground pork meat, salt, paprika and whatever else was considered appropriate.
When the meat and seasonings are thoroughly mixed, it is all squeezed through a sausage maker into clear casings and proudly displayed on each team's table for the judges.
Outside the Sports Hall, a team of six butchers from a Serb meat company showed a crowd of several hundred people where the raw ingredients come from by butchering a pig. The animal was dead on arrival, but the Serbs did everything else, from shaving the bristles to cutting up the carcass.
From butchering a pig, complete with blowtorch for searing the bristles, to grinding the meat, mixing it with spices and squeezing it into long, filmy sausage casings, pig to plate is on display with little left to the imagination.
"Any foreigner who ever tasted Hungarian sausage will always ask me: 'Can you please bring me that sausage again?'," said Gyula Bodrogi, a Hungarian actor and member of the jury that judges the best of the day's kolbasz.
And people do love it. The 15th year of the four-day festival in a rural area of southeastern Hungary, near the Romanian border, drew an estimated 100,000 visitors over the end-of-October holiday weekend.
While others celebrated Halloween, many Hungarians and Romanians spent time well-fed at what organizers say is the biggest eating and drinking event in eastern and central Europe - a food--focused flipside to Germany's beer-based Oktoberfest.
People come for the weather, which this year was sunny and mild, for music from local and regional rock and folk bands, for dancing, crafts, amusement park rides, beer, wine and the ever-present, potent and often homemade "palinka" fruit brandy.
But most of all they come for the kolbasz (sausage in Hungarian), made according to a century-old recipe with pork, paprika, garlic, caraway seeds plus various tricks of the trade, available in sizes from finger-shaped to monsters more than a metre long, and ranging in texture from dry to moist and in spiciness from mild to mouth-destroying.
Visitors can also watch and cheer about 500 teams making the kolbasz from scratch, competing in a good-natured, carnival-like, -palinka-fueled atmosphere.
The sausage-making contest provides a focus for the festival, and a chance for one-upmanship among sausage makers.
"Let's do it, guys," said Bence Szabo, 23-year-old team leader of a group of university friends, many of them software programmers in Budapest, as about eight hands in plastic gloves kneaded the contents of a plastic bin containing about 10 kilograms of ground pork meat, salt, paprika and whatever else was considered appropriate.
When the meat and seasonings are thoroughly mixed, it is all squeezed through a sausage maker into clear casings and proudly displayed on each team's table for the judges.
Outside the Sports Hall, a team of six butchers from a Serb meat company showed a crowd of several hundred people where the raw ingredients come from by butchering a pig. The animal was dead on arrival, but the Serbs did everything else, from shaving the bristles to cutting up the carcass.
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