Dansk Pork: Flæskesteg Sandwiches

Flæskesteg, Danish-style roast pork with crackling, is considered a national dish of Denmark by many. In centuries past, traditional Danish cuisine consisted of peasant food, cabbages and potatoes, onions and other root vegetables, dried grains and legumes, pickled vegetables, dried sausages, salted and smoked fish and pork. Fresh pork was a rare treat enjoyed solely around the Christmas holidays, when Danish farms would butcher a pig they’d been fattening all year and consume the more perishable bits right away–the organs, blood, etc.–and then salt, hang, and smoke much of the rest of it for winter storage.

Toward the end of the 19th Century, the Industrial Revolution introduced mass-produced commodity meats to the Danish consumer and wood-burning stoves to the Danish home. This, along with the mainstreaming of meat grinders, led to the development of many of today’s more common Danish dishes such as medisterpølse, frikadeller, various meatloafs, fried fish, and helped make the pork roast more of an everyday meal, though it is still a favorite at Christmastime.

Flæskesteg is made with a skin-on cut of meat, scored and salted, roasted hard to develop crisp cracklings, also known as pork rinds. The cracklings are, according to every source I’ve consulted, a non-negotiable feature of a Flæskesteg roast. According to Adamant Kitchen, there are 3 main cuts of pork used for Flæskesteg in Denmark: the loin (Svinekam), the side (Ribbenssteg, very much like a thick cut of pork belly), or a piece cut from the back near the neck (Nakkekam, which seems to be a shoulder cut similar to coppa with a thick fat cap and rind but I’m not entirely sure). In my area, without using a bespoke butcher, there are only 2–well, let’s say 2.5–cuts of pork I can easily find with the skin still on them. Those are pork belly and a ham (with the .5 being a picnic ham).

Well I tried making it with a picnic ham, but… the problem with getting the skin crisp is that the skin really needs to be completely level to finish nicely under a broiler. After removing the bone from the picnic ham and arranging it as evenly as I could, it was obvious that the cracklings would finish wildly unevenly. Even on a relatively flat cut like a belly, minor variances in the thickness of the meat can cause one half of the cracklings to go past crisp and into semi-burnt territory, while the other half barely crisps up at all, like so

Additionally, the picnic ham consists of various muscles converging around a joint, and once that was boned out, the grain of those muscles ran in all different directions. The belly was the better choice here, even if I did get it a bit on the toasty side. (I scraped off the really blackened bits)

Besides, belly not only reheats very well in the air fryer, but that also helps the rawer-looking skin develop that crispy, chicharrone-like finish. I used this very simple recipe, adding rosemary leaves in addition to the dried bay leaves, made gravy from the pan drippings, and served the roast with red cabbage and mashed potatoes. The mashed potatoes may be less traditional than Danish-style caramelized potatoes would be, but to my American eye that gravy was calling out for a base of lumpy mash.

And Flæskesteg is delicious, an excellent and festive winter roast, warm and comforting as are its accompaniments. It is not the dinner itself which is our focus here, though–rather it is what happens to the leftovers.

Flæskesteg Smørrebrød

Long-time Sandwich Tribunal readers and other sandwich aficionados may think of Smørrebrød, which the Tribunal have covered on a few occasions, when the subject of Danish sandwiches comes up. It was my first thought as well. And it it not unheard of in Denmark. A Google search for flæskesteg smørrebrød will bring up many Danish-language results, though few in English, describing various implementations of a roast pork open face sandwich, with cracklings.

There are many variations. But many of them will follow much the same pattern. They start with rugbrød, the Danish rye bread that forms the base of a smørrebrød, dense and nutty, sliced thin and buttered thickly. Some will add lettuce; some will not. But in addition to the crisp-skinned roast pork there will often be thin slices of pickled cucumber, whether the sweetish Agurkasalat we’ve made here previously or a saltier, sourer gherkin; rødkål, the Danish version of sweet and sour red cabbage salad, similar to dishes served in Germany and Poland; and perhaps some thin slices of citrus fruits, oranges or lemons, as a garnish.

For my version, I did not break any barriers. Rugbrød, butter, lettuce, flæskesteg, rødkål, pickles, orange slice. I added a smattering of crispy fried onions to mine, because their use as a sandwich topping was a revelation to me, that I discovered mainly by eating Danish sandwiches, both smørrebrod and their delightfully excessive Bøfsandwich.

There were a handful, and it didn’t take long for the bread to begin disintegrating under the fatty, warm pork and the juicy cabbage. But using hands, a fork, or just scooping the last bite from the edge of the plate because it no longer retains enough structure to be picked up—they were delicious.

They were not, however, the type of Flæskesteg sandwich that got this entry added to our list.

Flæskesteg Sandwich

The “real” Flæskesteg sandwich has English-language writeups on Gastro Obscura, Taste Atlas, The Guardian, and many other sites. At the center of all this online hubbub is a tiny hole-in-the-wall Copenhagen eatery called Isted Grill that sells a simple yet clearly compelling sandwich featuring slices of this roast pork along with the cracklings on a simple hamburger bun. Their version includes red cabbage, a sweet/sour pickled cucumber dish called Agurksalat, and depending on which writeup you read, either Remoulade or Bearnaise sauce. Isted Grill’s menu mentions both, but neither in conjunction with this particular sandwich.

So starting with a hamburger bun, on which I put plenty of Danish remoulade sauce

I added red cabbage and sliced pickle–a sweet refrigerator pickle would be the closest analog to Agurksalat, though bread-and-butter pickles wouldn’t be a terrible substitute either. Full disclosure: I used sliced gherkins, because I like my pickles sour and salty, and the red cabbage is sweet to begin with. But I can see that the Agurksalat would be a good addition as well.

Then a few slices of Flæskesteg–maybe a few more than Isted Grill would use–with crackling, reheated in an air fryer to get that crackling as crisp as it could be.

And that’s it. That’s the sandwich.

My stacking order may not match how they build them at Isted Grill. Maybe I should have used Bearnaise instead of Remoulade, or Agurksalat instead of gherkins. But I can’t see how either change would have improved this sandwich.

I’ve eaten three of them this week, all built exactly the same, and I’ll probably have another for lunch tomorrow. It is as good a fast food sandwich as I think you’re likely to find–not better than other, different hole-in-the-wall fast food sandwiches from other, different areas of the world, but as good as any of them. Front and center is the pork, well-salted and dried overnight as part of the prep, just enough to concentrate its flavor, make the pork even porkier. Danish remoulade, like many Danish condiments, is sweet, rich and fatty like a mayonnaise, but a little sour too with bits of pickle and kraut, the bite of mustard, the warmth of curry spices–a complex mix of flavors, but mainly providing depth against the savory pork and its main foil, the sweet-and-sour red cabbage. In this mix, the pickles did not stand out, but I did appreciate the intermittent salty sour bite they provided.

So maybe I should make Agurksalat. Maybe I should make Bearnaise sauce. Maybe I should use less pork, and stack the ingredients differently. But I’m happy with the sandwich as I experienced it, and I think I got a sense for why so many people love the version at Isted Grill! Copenhagen has some of the most famous restaurants in the world–Noma, due to close in 2024 but intermittently considered the best restaurant in the world for much of the past decade, is located there as well. But if I ever find myself lucky enough to visit, Isted Grill will be among my first stops.