Finnish Porilainen

Almost every English-language writeup online that I’ve found of the Finnish Porilainen sandwich–and there aren’t all that many, to be honest, but hey! we’re adding to that number–uses some form of the phrase “a combination hot dog and hamburger.”

That sounds like a bologna sandwich to me.

The photos–and here, check for yourself–all show a thick pink disk between bread, sometimes sliced bread, sometimes a roll, but almost always with marks from being toasted on a grill.

Guys, that looks an awful lot like bologna to me.

So let’s take a step back then. What does Porilainen mean, and what kind of sausage is used in it?

Well Pori is a city in Finland, and Porilainen basically means of or from Pori, much like Hamburger in German means of or from Hamburg. According to this page from a Spanish travel website, the sausage it uses is called Korpelan Metsästäjänwurst. Korpela might refer to a 20th Century Scandinavian religious sect, or this park in central Finland, but odds are that in this context it’s actually this manufacturer of smoked meats–i.e., it’s a brand name. As for Metsästäjänwurst, “wurst” is the German word for sausage–as far as I can tell, the more common Suomi word for sausage is “makkara”–and Metsästäjän translates to English as “Hunter’s.”

So. Hunter’s sausage. With the help of my eldest, who is studying linguistics at the University of Illinois, I was able to determine that a better translation of this phrase into Finnish might be Jahti Makkara, or Jahtimakkara. Comparing the google results between Metsästäjänwurst and Jahtimakkara, I find far more of the latter (though I often see Metsästäjänmakkara as well), while the former all appear to be Spanish language sites who’ve plagiarized the same article where I found the word.

Furthermore, I found this Suomi language treatise on sausages, which has a one-word definition of jahtimakkara: Jagdwurst. Jagdwurst is German hunting sausage, and it seems like many of the Finnish sausages in the document linked above are compared to it. The Finnish version is garlic heavy, and a similar sausage called Sipulimakkara or sipuliteemakkara, also often used in porilainen according to many of the Finnish sources I’ve found, is a similar sausage where the garlic is replaced with onion.

While Finnish sausages are hard to find around here, German sausages are not, and as luck has it, Jagdwurst is available at a sausage shop in Chicago called Gene’s.

I took a number and waited for my turn at the deli counter, only to be told that the 1 pound chubs of Jagdwurst were available in a cooler behind me.

I got it home and excitedly cut it open to take a look.

I’m not crazy, right? That’s bologna.

Unfortunately, this chub of Jagdwurst was only about 2 inches in diameter and thus entirely too small to use in a sandwich on standard sized bread. Naturally I would have to make my own. It stands to reason, right?

I used a combination of lean pork loin, lean beef top round, and fatty pork belly for the basis of this sausage. For the basic seasoning of the sausage I used a combination of Prague Powder #1, kosher salt, cardamom, ginger, coriander, white pepper, mustard powder, allspice, corn sugar, and powdered milk. After that, I split the batch in two and used fresh garlic for half (garlic being a key seasoning in jahtimakkara) and fresh finely-minced onion for the other half (to make sipulimakkara). I ground all the pork through the fine die in my meat grinder but used the coarse die for the beef and stuffed the resulting sausage into beef bung casings that were around 4 inches in diameter. After hanging and developing a pellicle for 2 days, I smoked the sausages over alder wood, the wood used most commonly in smoking meats in Finland.

Unfortunately, the Sipulimakkara fell off its hook and, closer to the heat source, got a bit overdone on one side. Still, they turned out pretty good.

Generally speaking porilainen is described as a half-inch thick slice of sausage on white bread with ketchup, mustard, pickle and onion. Some of the photos I’ve found show standard pickle chips like you’d get on a hamburger. Some of them show something seemingly like pickle relish. Yet my research into Finnish cuisine had brought a Finnish cucumber salad called kurkkusalaatti to my attention. Essentially a quick sweet pickle, it seemed like a reasonable alternative to add a bit of authenticity to my sandwich.

Kurkkusalaatti is made by slicing cucumbers thinly, salting and pressing them, squeezing out most of the moisture, and then dressing them with white wine vinegar, sugar, dill, and white pepper. It’s a tasty side dish and makes an excellent condiment as well.

To make my porilainen, I started by cutting a half-inch-thick slice of the jahtimakkara and heating it on the grill for a few minutes. Once I flipped the sausage over, I added two slices of plain white bread, toasting them in the time it took to finish the sausage.

To assemble the sandwich, first I added the sausage to the bread.

Then I added some sharp German mustard and regular ketchup.

And finally, diced Vidalia onion and the kurkkusalaatti.

My jahtimakkara was good, juicy and garlicky, not too salty but well seasoned and with a nice presence of smoke. The ketchup and cucumber salad added some sweetness to the sandwich that was well balanced by the sharpness of the mustard and diced onion.

I have to say, I’m not much of a sweet pickle fan generally, but the cucumber salad really shines here. I combined a few different recipes I found online and took it easy on the sugar, but I can see myself making this regularly, especially later in the summer once my cucumbers come in. It’s bright, fresh, has a bit of heat from the white pepper and a nice balance of sweet and tart.

I repeated the process with the onion sausage.

This sausage was a bit dryer than the garlic sausage, likely due to being slightly overcooked. There’s a good flavor there but I think I prefer the garlic in the jahtimakkara to the onion flavor here. I don’t regret using the fresh allium though, even after 2 hours in the smoker the flavors are far brighter than powdered spices would have provided.

Still, it’s a bologna sandwich, and not a particularly fancy one, despite the care I took sourcing or preparing some of the ingredients. I get the feeling that fancy is not what this sandwich is about though; rather, it’s a quick meal to whip up on the stovetop or around a campfire, using common (and portable, in the case of a camping trip) ingredients. I’m a fan, no doubt, and I enjoyed learning about the sandwich, and didn’t even need to fly to Finland to try it. I’m ready to move on, though. June is coming, and bringing with it three new sandwiches for the Tribunal to try. I can’t wait!