Flat Sausage Fair
On one such occasion, a student who came from Pirot, one of the biggest cities of eastern Serbia, asked us if we had ever tried before a sausage called "vitamin bomb", which, he said, was one of the oldest delicacies from the region he came from. I spotted that one of the professors, who was actually known to have tried almost everything when it came to food and drinks, started nodding his head, but it was clear that the rest of us heard it for the first time. The student looked at the professor and said, "I am sure you never tasted this one," and pulled out from the bag a ... well ... something that looked exactly like a "horseshoe" in both shape and color. I glanced toward the professor who claimed that he tasted it before and saw that even he was surprised with the strange-looking sausage in the student's hands. The student glimpsed the same, warmly smiled, and explained to us what it is and how it's made. Today, almost two decades later, the "vitamin bomb" sausage is a recognized brand, and the simple translation from Serbian "Peglana Kobasica" is "Ironed" or "Flat" Sausage. Last year, the town of Pirot and its tourist organization created the first "Flat Sausage Fair", and yesterday, despite poor weather, we decided to visit the second fair made in honor of this great Serbian soul food, which is the mutual name for all those old recipes that survived centuries in their original forms.
But what is so special about this sausage that it earned its own fair?
The recipe is not the secret, although this is not a meal you can make in a couple of hours in your home; with a little enthusiasm, it is doable, and results could be extraordinary. From what I can find online, you need a great selection of various quality meats (cleaned and stripped of all fats and unwanted parts), ultra-finely chopped or minced and mixed with spices (up to 2% of different chilies, 2% salt, 1% garlic, and 1% pepper, followed by other suitable spices according to your taste). No water or any other liquids are welcome in the mixture. Now comes the interesting part. After filling is ready and wrapped into eatable natural sausage casing, sausage should be formed in the "U" shape and left for drying on the draft. The drying "chamber" must be very cold, with an optimal temperature around zero degrees or colder, with as low humidity as possible, and in the presence of great frost, keeping outside water from vaporizing in great scales. Usually with a bottle, sausages are pressed and ironed two or three times a week, after which they take the form of a horseshoe. Ironing is necessary for most of the unnecessary air and water to be ejected from the sausage, which ensures longevity. Needless to say, they are purely organic with no preservation of any kind, no additives or artificial colors, no heat treatment, and no exposure to smoke.
Since there is no strict recipe when it comes to ingredients, it is clear that with different mixtures of various meats and spices, they come in a wide variety of different tastes, and given the fact that they are made of and the nature of the preparation that has not changed from the times dating a couple of centuries before, in my humble opinion, I have to say that I haven't tried better sausage yet. And believe me, I have tried many. Even those advertised on large scales, like the white sausages of Bavaria or great Danish delicacies you can buy outdoors, are simply not worthy rivals. Furthermore, the energy value of the sausage is very high, and it is usually served in small dosages and sliced into tiny, a couple of millimeters chopped pieces. Best of all, due to the fact they contain almost no water inside, you can store them in a deep freezer, where they keep their original taste and shape even after a couple of months. Yesterday's fair was, like the year before, organized very nicely and with thousands of people browsing and tasting the specimens. We bought a couple of kilos of different varieties with different meat mixtures and spice ratios, and the winner for me was a hot, whitish, extra tasty brand. It was moderately hot, made out of four different kinds of meat (besides beef, they used the best parts of goat, horse, and donkey meat), and with a great mixture of spices. The casing is giving this particular one a whitish color, which is also pretty cool and unique.
Unfortunately, because of yesterday's weather and half a meter of snow outside our weekend house, we couldn't get to the fair earlier and see its social side, so I am including the video I made last year. Somehow and also to my taste, the jazz band playing last winter fits greatly to this particular fair and the advertising product.
Serbian Flat Sausage*
http://www.rostiljanje.com/gastronomske-manifestacije/peglana-kobasica/
Image Refs:
http://www.pirotskevesti.rs/lokalna-samouprava/na-hiljade-turista-dolazi-na-sajam-peglane/
http://www.pirotskevesti.rs/gradska-hronika/pocinje-prijava-za-sajam-peglane-kobasice/
http://www.pirotskevesti.rs/lokalna-samouprava/ogromno-interesovanje
Refs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NjN4KZ1zdo
http://www.peglana.com/english/index.htm
http://www.pirotskevesti.rs/zivot-drustvo/praznik-peglane-u-hali-kej/
http://fondazioneslowfood.it/ark/details/1707/pirot-ironed-sausage
http://www.tanjug.rs/news/113206/pirot-hosts-flat-sausage-fair.htm