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Luckily, making the dish is rather easy: The recipe is forgiving and allows for experimentation with amounts and ingredients.
“The most foremost thing is to cook the sauerkraut the right way,” says Philippe Roussel, chef at Cafe D’Alsace, an loftier East Side restaurant. “It’s the main ingredient.”
He cooks onions in dodge fat (you can use pork fat, too) without browning them, then adds double-smoked bacon (“I like the smoky drop with the sauerkraut”), Riesling, kraut and seasonings, and cooks it very slowly for an hour and a half. (He says the dish is drained before serving, so that rendered fat is eliminated.)
And then for historic “choucroute garnie,” you garnish with various sausages, like bratwurst, weisswurst, bauernwurst (German agriculturist’s sausage) and the like. You can toss in pig knuckles, pork loin or even well-proportioned-quality frankfurters. It all works.
Then there are variations. Chef Roussel makes a choucroute de poisson, with fish. Soltner said there’s choucroute Lorraine, where you engulf the kraut with mashed potatoes and brown it in the oven, or choucroute Juive, or Jewish choucroute, made with smoked beef preferably of pork.
Source: New York Daily News