HUNGARY: Pork lovers get together for a four-day festival showcasing Hungary's spicy kolbasz sausages

Record ID: 739581

  • Title: HUNGARY: Pork lovers get together for a four-day festival showcasing Hungary's spicy kolbasz sausages
  • Date: 31st October 2011
  • Summary: BEKESCSABA, HUNGARY (OCTOBER 29, 2011) (REUTERS) PAN OVER TEAMS MAKING SAUSAGES IN SPORTS HALL WHERE FESTIVAL TAKING PLACE TEAM MINCING MEAT CLOSE OF MEAT TEAM STIRRING MINCE WITH HANDS TEAM SPRINKLING SALT OVER LAYER OF PAPRIKA ON PORK VARIOUS OF TEAM KNEADING MINCE WITH HANDS
  • Embargoed: 15th November 2011 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Hungary, Hungary
  • Country: Hungary
  • Topics: Quirky,Light / Amusing / Unusual / Quirky
  • Reuters ID: LVAD2VCJBJBRBX9UBUUG2FFPTODM
  • Story Text: The annual Bekescsaba Sausage Festival is the place to taste and find out secrets of Hungary's spicy kolbasz sausages, but people who prefer not to know where their food comes from may prefer to stay away.
    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 that fit just so over the nozzle of a purpose-built stuffing machine, the journey from pig to plate is on display with little left to the imagination.
    And people love it. The 15th year of the four-day festival in a rural area of south-eastern Hungary, near the Romanian border, drew an estimated 100,000 visitors over the October holiday weekend, winding up on Monday.
    While others celebrated Halloween and All Saints Day, many Hungarians and Romanians spent their time getting a good feed at what organisers say is the biggest eating and drinking event in eastern and central Europe -- a food-focused flipside to Germany's beery 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 home-made "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, but also various tricks of the trade, and available in sizes and shapes from finger-sized to monsters more than a metre (yard) long, ranging in texture from dry to moist and in spiciness from mild to mouth-destroying.
    Visitors also get to watch and cheer on about 500 roughly 10-person teams making the kolbasz from scratch, competing in a good-natured, carnival-like, palinka-fueled atmosphere. It is, in fact, hard to be in the Sports Hall for more than five minutes and not be offered a shot of palinka, or three.
    "There are other festivals but this atmosphere, this crazy good spirit, the teams are unrivalled anywhere else," said Jozsef Nemeth, deputy president of the sausage-judging jury.
    The sausage-making contest provides a focus for the festival, and a chance for one upmanship among sausage makers.
    Many teams said their sausages contained special blends of paprika, garlic, or top quality pork, or maintained their team was best at mixing it all up.
    A group of university friends, many of them now software programmers in Budapest, kneaded the contents of a big plastic bin full of about 10 kg (22 lb) of freshly ground pork meat, plus salt, paprika and whatever they thought was good.
    When the meat and seasonings are thoroughly mixed, it is squeezed through a sausage maker, into clear casings and proudly displayed on each team's table, for the judges to come by and decide who made the day's best kolbasz.
    It all happens in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere, with one table helping out another, sharing ingredients and palinka, and anything else anyone needs, until the entire festival feels like one huge, if somewhat tipsy, family.
    "We just like to be together we were always together at the university as well, we were doing the same there, now we are working all of us and here its like university time," member of the university friends team, Edit Szimednov said.
    What is the secret of the best Hungarian kolbasz? Sausage makers such as 62-year-old former prizewinner Mihaly Kovacs says they all have their little secret trick but is convinced that the key is the high quality of the local paprika spice.
    "The paprika spice of this area is unrivalled. Even within Hungary there are very few other places that would have sausages of this colour because they don't have this kind of paprika which grow here in the Great Plain. And it also depends on how that ground paprika is made," Kovacs said.
    Outside the Sports Hall, in a roped-off area, a team of six butchers from the Serb meat company Agropupak, in Kukujevci, Serbia, showed a crowd of several hundred people, including youngsters who possibly never had been on a farm, where the raw ingredients of sausage come from by butchering a pig.
    The pig was dead on arrival, but the Serbs did everything else, from shaving the bristles to cutting up the carcass.
    "It [the way pigs are killed] is very similar, very similar. The differences are in the details. The way of processing is little bit different but a pig in Hungary or in Serbia is the same thing. By the way we are processing Hungarian pigs in Serbia," Bogatic said.
    The presence of the Serbs, plus sausage-making teams from Romania, Slovakia, Germany, Austria and elsewhere in central and eastern Europe, gives the festival an international flavour, and makes it an occasion for good-natured national rivalries. Sausages do bring people together in an all-powerful way, contestants agreed.
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