Currywurst

Next time I’m in Germany visiting Chris, I’m eating a Volkswagen currywurst. That’s not a joke — VW makes its own, it has a part number, and it outsells the cars.

Part no. 199 398 500 A. Produced at Wolfsburg since 1973, originally just canteen food. In 2024 VW made 8.552 million of them, a third consecutive record, plus 659,000 bottles of the curry ketchup — which has its own part number, 199 398 500 B. Dealers order both through the ordinary parts system, and they get handed to customers after a sale. VW has called it its most popular non-vehicle part.

There’s a nice symmetry to this one. In 2010 I took Chris — my German exchange student, from Hamburg — to Negaunee, Michigan and fed him a cudighi he’d never heard of. This is the trip going the other way.

But the recipe below is not VW’s. Theirs is a company secret and it’s canteen production: a smoked Bockwurst in a cellulose casing, 30-odd trained butchers, 18,000 a day. You can’t reproduce that and there’s no point pretending. What you can make is a proper currywurst — and the sauce is where all the interesting technique lives. This is built from two published German recipes, and the thing most English-language versions get wrong is in the Directions: the curry goes on twice.

Ingredients

• The curry ketchup
• 1 white onion, finely diced
• 4 Tbsp oil (2 for the sauce, 2 for the sausages)
• 2 tsp curry powder — HALF into the sauce, half for dusting (see Directions)
• 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
• 3 Tbsp tomato paste
• 200 g tomato ketchup (about 3/4 cup)
• 100 ml cloudy apple juice (about 1/2 cup — naturtrüb, unfiltered)
• 2 tsp cider vinegar

Salt and pepper

• Optional, from the butcher’s version — see Notes
• 1 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
• 1 tsp soy sauce
• 1 tsp mustard
• 1/2 tsp smoked paprika
• 2 Tbsp brown sugar
• The sausage
• 4 Bratwurst — fine-textured and scalded (fein, gebrüht), i.e. a Brühwurst, not a coarse raw bratwurst
• To finish
• Curry powder, for dusting — 1/2 to 1 tsp per portion
• Pommes frites, to serve

Directions

Key ingredients

Worcestershire Sauce · Mustard · Soy Sauce · Black Pepper

1. Bloom the curry powder in fat — this is the single biggest thing:
2. Sweat the diced onion in 2 Tbsp of hot oil for about 2 minutes. Add 1 tsp of the curry powder and the 1/4 tsp cayenne and let them sizzle briefly in the oil before any liquid arrives.
3. Curry powder is mostly fat-soluble aromatics. Stirred into cold ketchup it stays raw, dusty and faintly gritty — which is exactly what most quick versions taste like. Both published German recipes put it into hot fat first, and it’s the difference between a real curry ketchup and ketchup with curry powder in it.
4. Roast the tomato paste:
5. Stir in the 3 Tbsp of tomato paste and cook it briefly until it darkens and smells nutty. Every serious German recipe browns the Tomatenmark before deglazing. It’s a caramelization step, and it buys a depth that no amount of extra ketchup will.
6. Build and reduce:
7. Stir in the ketchup, cloudy apple juice and cider vinegar and bring to a boil. If you’re using the butcher’s additions, they go in here — Worcestershire, soy, mustard, smoked paprika, brown sugar — and simmer 10–15 minutes until it thickens.
8. The apple juice is doing real work. It brings fruit acid and fruit sugar rather than plain sucrose, and it’s the reason the sauce doesn’t read as sweet sludge. The vinegar matters for the same reason — bottled ketchup already has acid in it, and you’re adding more on purpose.
9. Purée it:
10. Blitz smooth with a stick blender and season with salt and pepper. Currywurst sauce is smooth and pourable, never a chunky relish.
11. Fry the sausages:
12. In the remaining 2 Tbsp oil over medium, turning, 10–15 minutes, until properly golden brown all over. Slower than you think — you want colour on every side, not a fast sear.
13. Slice, sauce, and then dust — do not skip the dust:
14. Cut the sausages into rounds, spoon the hot sauce over, and then dust each portion with another 1/2 to 1 tsp of curry powder, dry, on top.
15. This is the step nearly every English-language recipe omits, and it isn’t a garnish. At a German Imbiss the dry curry hits your nose before you taste anything, and stands vary the grade and heat of what they dust with. Sauce carries the sweet-sour-savoury; the dusting carries the aroma. Curry goes on twice.
16. Serve:
17. With Pommes frites, and a small wooden fork if you’re being proper about it.

Notes

Which recipes this is built from

Recipe A — essen&trinken, a major German food magazine, is the backbone: onion, oil, curry powder, cayenne, tomato paste, ketchup, cloudy apple juice, cider vinegar. Its structure is the important part — half the curry in the sauce, half dusted at the end.

Recipe B — Dirk Ludwig, a well-known master butcher in Fulda, adds the umami layer: Worcestershire, soy sauce, mustard, smoked paprika, brown sugar, and cola or orange juice as the fruit note. I’ve folded his additions in as optional because they genuinely change the sauce — richer and darker, less bright.

His Worcestershire is the interesting one: it ties straight back to Herta Heuwer’s original 1949 mixture. See Worcestershire Sauce.

Untested by me.

The Volkswagen sausage — what’s actually true

Part no. 199 398 500 A, made at Wolfsburg since 1973. The curry ketchup is part no. 199 398 500 B — a detail almost every write-up misses.

2024: 8.552 million units, a third straight record — roughly 6.32M classic, 2.18M retail hot-dog, 56k beef-only, 42k vegan — plus 659,000 bottles of ketchup. Figures come from IG Metall bei Volkswagen, the in-plant works council that publishes them annually.

⚠ “VW sells more sausages than cars” needs a qualifier. It’s true against the Volkswagen brand (4.8M vehicles in 2024). It is not true against the Volkswagen Group (~9.03M). The sausage is closing on the Group but hasn’t passed it. Atlas Obscura’s “2015 and 2017” is a frozen listicle formulation — 2015, 2023 and 2024 check out; 2017 could not be isolated.

⚠ The daily-output figure doesn’t reconcile. 18,000/day works out near 4.5M/year against a verified 8.55M. Unresolved — possibly a stale number, possibly one line of several.

What it actually is: a smoked Bockwurst in a cellulose casing you peel before eating. That’s atypical of every German regional tradition — see below. Seasoning includes curry powder, pepper and ginger; the recipe is a company secret.

⚠ Don’t repeat the “smoked at 176 °C” figure that circulates — it’s near-certainly a °F→°C error. 176 °F = 80 °C, which is right for a Brühwurst.

The 2021 removal, correctly told

The story usually runs “VW banned the currywurst, then caved.” That’s wrong in scale.

It was one canteen out of roughly thirty — the restaurant in the Markenhochhaus, the board high-rise, which went meat-free. Never plant-wide. The sausage stayed on sale everywhere else, and sales rose.

Gerhard Schröder’s reaction is real — the former chancellor sat on VW’s supervisory board. On LinkedIn: “Wenn ich noch im Aufsichtsrat von #VW säße, hätte es so etwas nicht gegeben” — “if I were still on VW’s supervisory board, that wouldn’t have happened” — calling the currywurst “der Kraftriegel der Facharbeiterin und des Facharbeiters,” the skilled worker’s energy bar.

Meat returned on 7 August 2023 after a staff survey — and note the wording: as an additional option alongside the vegan dishes, not a reversal of them.

Currywurst itself — and Herta Heuwer never patented anything

The story is that Herta Heuwer invented currywurst in Berlin on 4 September 1949, mixing ketchup, curry powder and Worcestershire sauce obtained from British soldiers.

She did not patent it. The German Patent and Trade Mark Office is explicit: she registered a trademark — “Chillup”, filed 21 February 1958, registered 21 January 1959, no. 721319, for a Spezialsoße. That’s a nine-year gap after the claimed invention date, and the DPMA itself hedges with “allegedly” on the 1949 story.

Hamburg’s rival claim rests on a fictional character in a 1993 novella. That’s worth stating plainly.

⚠ The Deutsches Currywurst Museum in Berlin closed on 21 December 2018. Guidebooks and blogs still sending you there are seven-plus years stale.

Mit Darm oder ohne Darm — the real regional split

More interesting than the sauce. The base is normally a fine Brühwurst, a scalded emulsion sausage, usually pork and beef.

• West Berlin — bratwurst fried in its natural casing (mit Darm), firm and snappy.
• East Berlin — fine Brühwurst, skinless (ohne Darm), the Dosenwurst. Konnopke’s Imbiss under the Schönhauser Allee viaduct is the institution.
• Ruhrgebiet — bratwurst, usually mit Darm.

And the reason for the East Berlin skinless version is Cold War economics, not taste: the GDR had chronic raw-material shortages and exported its natural sausage casings west for hard currency. Skinless was also cheaper to mass-produce and easier to store — exactly what a planned economy wants.

⚠ That explanation is consistent across German butchery and food-writing sources and fits the geography exactly, but I found no archival or scholarly source stating the casing export specifically. Present it as the standard German account, not as proven.

The VW sausage sits outside this taxonomy entirely — made in a cellulose casing that you remove. Made with a skin, eaten without one.

How to actually eat the VW one

• Autostadt Wolfsburg, the self-service restaurant in the KundenCenter (“Tachometer”). This is the answer for a visitor — the Autostadt is a public paid attraction, no employee access needed, and it’s explicitly pitched as giving visitors a taste of the works canteens.
• The works canteens serve it with ketchup and Pommes but are not open to the public. (Sources say 17 canteens; others say ~30. Unresolved — probably “restaurants” vs “all catering outlets.”)
• Factory tours run from the Autostadt, but whether a currywurst is included in any given package is not confirmed — check when booking. The reliable move is take the tour, then eat at the KundenCenter.
• Buying packs: SB-Shops inside the plants sell them; supermarkets around Wolfsburg carry the hot-dog variant. Any VW dealer can order part 199 398 500 A through the parts system — whether they’ll sell to a walk-in is at their discretion, but it’s the classic enthusiast move and worth simply asking.
• Mail order, Germany only: OTTO GOURMET ships the Classic 1973 frozen, €13.90 / 510 g. The ketchup travels; the sausage doesn’t leave the cold chain.

Still open

• No first-party VW press release could be retrieved — the newsroom search is JavaScript-rendered and inside.volkswagen.de refused the connection outright. Everything here is via IG Metall and German press. A browser session against the newsroom would close this.
• Beef content is contested: one source says beef was dropped in the 1990s over BSE; the current retail declaration says 9.2% beef, and VW makes a beef-only variant.
• 2017’s figures couldn’t be isolated.
• 18,000/day vs 8.55M/year doesn’t add up.