This is stångkorv, a fascinating Swedish sausage that contains barley, and is fermented until it gets tangy. It’s really, really good for breakfast, and not terribly hard to make.

I learned about this sausage in the book The Nordic Cookbook by Magnus Nilsson, which I can highly recommend. It’s part of a larger family of fermented sausages that is in itself a larger family of Northern European fermented sausages.

Many of you will wrinkle your noses at the concept of fermented meat, but if I replace it with the word “tangy” everyone’s on board. Northern Europe tends to make these tangy sausages because of the weather, which is often wet — not ideal for making something like a basic Italian salami.

The addition of barley (cooked in salted water, drained and cooled) in the grind kickstarts the process. After you make this particular Swedish sausage, you hang it in a warm, humid place for a couple days to let the fermentation roll. Then you hang the links in a cool, drier place for another few days before eating or storing.

Fermenting and Drying

Because this is not a true dry-cured sausage, it’s easy to make at home — if you know how to make a basic sausage. If you are a little foggy on that, I wrote a primer on how to make sausage at home.

You shouldn’t need to buy and use a separate bacterial starter to make stångkorv, but if you want to be double-dog sure you’re getting the right lacto-fermentation going, I recommend using the starter LHP, which gives you strong tanginess.

I hang this Swedish sausage from the racks in my oven for a couple days (you can use your stovetop during this time), then let them finish in my fancy Dry Ager.

You don’t need a fancy curing chamber though. You can keep them in your regular fridge, uncovered, although they will make the fridge smell like delicious tangy meat. Or you can hang them in a basement or garage, so long as the temperature never gets above about 60F.

Because it’s just for a week or so, that makes this a great cured sausage project for newcomers. German landjaeger and Polish kabanos are very similar.

What’s the flavor? Addicting. I can’t get enough of that tang, and the warming spices of clove and allspice really make stångkorv perfect for chilly morning breakfasts.

You should know that because of the barley, this particular Swedish sausage doesn’t bind well. It’s a lot like Swedish potato sausage, where the mixture is cased, but it will be crumbly, unlike, say, German weisswurst or braunschweiger.

Serving Swedish Sausage

I tend to either cook stångkorv cased, and then tear into it like hash, or uncase it before cooking and actually cook it like hash; you do still need to initially case stångkorv because of the fermenting and hanging time.

It seems best as a breakfast sausage, with fried eggs and some form of potatoes, usually hash browns. It would also be excellent as part of a holiday stuffing or dressing, or added to Polish bigos.

Stångkorv will keep in the fridge for several weeks, and freezes very well.

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