Meat, sauerkraut and warm, delicious traditions: Bigos, Polish Hunter’s Stew

Kielbasa, pork roast, chicken, sauerkraut and cabbage anchor bigos, a hearty stew and Poland’s national dish. Recipe below.

TECHNICALLY, MARCH 1 IS THE END OF METEOROLOGICAL WINTER. So why is the weather still so wildly cold? In fact, just before sitting down to write this, I saw that this coming weekend we will be in a bubble of frigid air that will be the coldest on the planet. How can we face it? The answer, of course, is bigos.

Sometimes called the Polish national dish, bigos is a warm, warming stew of, mostly, sauerkraut and pork. It smells great, it tastes great, it makes you feel wonderful. Bigos is also known as Polish hunter’s stew.

A lot of the bigos recipes you will see out there concentrate on cheap sauerkraut (the kind in a can, made with vinegar) and cartloads of pork. Seriously, I ran across more than one that included bacon, boczek myśliwski (double-smoked Polish bacon), AND ham, AND kielbasa AND pork shoulder.

Okay, then. This recipe is closer to the way bigos was made at my house when I was growing up in Detroit: fermented cabbage, some sausage, pork, spices, a touch of fruit, and, in the tradition of my dad’s family, roasted birds—chicken or even duck. And honestly, why would you not want to include that? Bigos this way is like the vaunted choucroute garnie, only delicious. Why anyone would eat choucroute garnie when they could have bigos is beyond me.

Many bigos recipes skip roasting the pork and chicken, having you simply sauté chunks of meat. Go with the roasting. It gives the meats’ flavor extra depth, and since you’ll roast more than you need for the recipe, delicious leftovers for extra meals. In this stubbornly cold late winter, it will also warm your kitchen nicely.

Make the bigos a day ahead—maybe spend a quiet Saturday or Sunday roasting the meats, then cooking the bigos. It’s a slow process, but absolutely nothing about it is difficult. As delicious as it is when you first finish cooking it, bigos is infinitely better when it rests in the fridge overnight and you reheat it the next day.

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Bigos

Kielbasa, pork roast, chicken, sauerkraut and cabbage anchor bigos, a hearty stew and Poland’s national dish.

Course Stew

Cuisine Polish

Servings 8

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon unsalted butter
• 2 teaspoons lard
• 1 tablespoon neutral cooking oil
• 1/2 pound kielbasa, cut into coins
• 1 onion, coarsely chopped
• 3 tablespoons tomato paste
• 2 25- ounce jars of fermented sauerkraut—drain and reserve the juice (see Kitchen Notes)
• 1 small green cabbage, cored and shredded (yielding 6 or 7 cups of cabbage)
• 1 pound roasted pork, cut into cubes (see Kitchen Notes for a simple, delicious recipe)
• meat from 2 roasted bone-in chicken thighs, cut into cubes and bits
• 4 bay leaves
• 4 ounces fresh mushrooms, sliced
• 1 ounce dried mushrooms, soaked in hot water for an hour, then drained and torn into uniform sized pieces (see Kitchen Notes)
• 4 cups beef stock (you can substitute chicken stock or mushroom stock)
• 2 tart cooking apples, peeled and grated (this time I used Granny Smiths)
• 6 or 8 dried prunes, cut into bits
• 1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
• 1 teaspoon juniper berries, crushed (I folded them in a linen towel and hit them with a hammer)
• 1 teaspoon ground caraway

Instructions

• Roast the pork and the chicken—see Kitchen Notes.
• In a big, heavy pot, heat the butter, lard and oil. Then put in the kielbasa coins and quickly brown on both sides. Set aside. If need be, add a bit more oil to the pot and scrape the bottom. Then add the onions and sauté for a minute or two, until translucent. Add the tomato paste and sauté some more, stirring, two or three minutes.
• Then add the drained sauerkraut, the stock, the shredded cabbage, the spices and the bay leaves, and stir everything together. When it is all uniform, add the grated apple, the chopped prunes, and the fresh and dried mushrooms. Stir in the meat. Bring to a simmer, then cook gently over low heat for a couple of hours, uncovered, stirring now and then.
• Taste part way through—if it tastes sour, then add more apple or prune. After about two hours, turn off the heat. You may serve it right away, as noted above, but for maximum awesomeness, put it away in the fridge overnight, then cook a bit more the next day.
• We served this with a baguette and plenty of butter and, to drink, a terrific 2017 Averaen pinot noir from Oregon's Willamette Valley that our friends Chris and Julie brought. Its light style is perfect for bigos. Or, of course, a good Polish beer.

Kitchen Notes

Start with good sauerkraut. We prefer using fermented sauerkraut for this dish. It just tastes better. One brand we like a lot is Bubbies, available at Whole Foods, among other places. But if you cannot find it, or are in a hurry, or want to cut costs, by all means use canned sauerkraut. Just give it a rinse to cut down the vinegary aspect. I also recommend choosing a plain, straight-ahead sauerkraut—not something sweetened or with beets or radishes in it. Those would be fine and you would not be committing a gastronomic crime, but for this, the classic is best. And by the way, the reason you save the sauerkraut juice is to drink it later, mmmmmmmmm.

Easy, amazing roast pork. Here is a foolproof technique for a pork roast. Start with a bone-in pork shoulder or pork butt roast—we used a Boston blade roast, about 4 pounds. Preheat your oven to 425ºF. Rub the roast with olive oil and 3 cloves chopped garlic, then season generously with salt and pepper. Put on a rack in a rimmed baking pan and roast it for 20 minutes, then reduce the heat to 325ºF and roast until the internal temperature is at least 185ºF. Figure about 30 minutes per pound. Tender, juicy, delicious. It yielded far more than the pound of meat we needed for the bigos—which was great because it gave us meat for sandwiches and dinners throughout the week.

Roasting chicken thighs. Season the thighs with salt, pepper and sweet paprika. Arrange on a hotel pan and add to the oven while the pork is roasting and bake for about 40 minutes. Done.

The mushrooms. For this dish, we chose dried borowik szlachetny—Boletus edulis, AKA porcini or cepes. Other good choices for the dried mushrooms are podgrzybki brunatne, Boletus badius, or shiitake mushrooms, Lentinula edodes. For the fresh mushrooms, simply use basic white mushrooms from the grocery store.