Nürnberger Rostbratwurst

I make German sausage all the time, straight out of a shelf of fifty-some sausage books — I’d just never bothered to write the formulas onto my own cards. This is me fixing that, starting where I tell everyone to start: the smallest mainstream German bratwurst there is — 7–9 cm, about 20 g, in sheep casing. Marjoram is its whole personality; everything else follows from the tiny caliber. The numbers here are the reference version I work from; I dial the marjoram up by taste.

Ingredients

MEAT BLOCK (2,270 g / 5 lb)

• 1,816 g (4 lb) lean pork shoulder — 80%
• 454 g (1 lb) pork back fat or belly fat — 20% (fat ≤35%; belly and jowl are correct, see notes)

SEASONING (per 2,270 g block)

• 41 g salt (1.8%)
• 4.5 g white pepper
• 2.3 g rubbed marjoram, fresh stock (1 g/kg — see notes; I’d taste toward 4–5 g)
• 2.3 g nutmeg
• 2.3 g ground ginger
• 0.7 g cardamom
• 2.3 g grated lemon zest
• NO cure — a fresh sausage eaten in a day or two needs none, and adding it is a color-and-flavor error, not a safety improvement
• 22–24 mm sheep casing

Directions

1. Key ingredients: Thüringer Rostbratwurst is its opposite number — make both and taste them side by side; a stranger can tell them apart blindfolded.
2. Buy fresh marjoram: it fades badly and an old jar is the most likely reason a first Nürnberger tastes like nothing. This one spice is the sausage.
3. Grind: single grind through a 5 mm (3/16”) plate, meat and fat kept and ground separately.
4. Mix — keep it cold: mix the meat with salt and spices to tackiness, then fold in the fat. Keep the whole block ≤4 °C / 40 °F. Twenty percent fat in a 22 mm casing smears the instant it warms, and smeared fat renders straight out on the grill and leaves you a dry sausage.
5. Stuff and link: 22–24 mm sheep casing, linked at 7–9 cm — about 20 g each.
6. Fresh or kept: cook and eat within 1–2 days. To hold them, scald at 80 °C / 176 °F for 15 minutes, chill, refrigerate — then they’re browned rather than cooked at service.
7. Cook: grill fast over beechwood if you have it. A 20 g sausage is done in a couple of minutes. Eat three to a roll — Drei im Weckla.
8. Decision point: pull a fried test patty after mixing and before stuffing. If the marjoram reads as background rather than foreground, push it up next batch. The PGI spec names marjoram but sets no quantity, so the dose is yours to settle.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t. The backbone is Marianski’s fresh-German formula, bounded by the actual PGI specification. This is the reference version I work from; I dial the exact spicing in by taste on the bench. The PGI (g.g.A., registered 2003) protects the geography, not a secret recipe: total fat ≤35%, connective-tissue-free meat protein ≥12%, sheep casing, made within Nuremberg city limits.

The correction most sources miss. Commission Regulation (EU) 973/2013 exists specifically because the original spec said “roughly defatted pigmeat,” and the German Leitsätze define that to exclude fatty meat — but producers had always used belly and jowl. The 2013 amendment fixed it by naming the fatty cuts outright. So a Nürnberger is NOT a lean sausage, and any source calling it “lean defatted pork” is quoting the pre-2013 text without knowing the fight it caused. Fat ≤35%, belly and jowl permitted.

The name and the size. The smallness is documented as a deliberate 16th-century quality trade-off: when meat prices spiked, the Nuremberg council permitted a smaller sausage rather than a worse one. The charming “made small to pass through the keyhole after closing time” story is, per the producers’ own association, a legend — “a good story, not the core of the history.”

Still open. The PGI names marjoram but gives no legal dosage; Marianski’s 1 g/kg may be low. Ruhlman & Polcyn’s Charcuterie is on my shelf — worth checking this against their version.