Ukraine in Alberta: the Kubie Burger

I had never heard of the Kubie burger, a specialty of the Canadian province of Alberta, before I saw this video by friend of the site Sandwich Dad last summer:

Kubie (sometimes spelled “kubbie”) burgers are made with patties of Ukrainian-style sausage, cold-smoked and formed into burger-sized disks. The sausage is a type of kubasa, or kovbasa, which is coarsely-ground and garlic-forward, but in the case of the Kubie burger is formed into patties rather than rings or coils.

So why is Ukrainian sausage so popular in this Canadian prairie province? Because, as another sandwich expert, Talia Lavin of the newsletter The Sword and the Sandwich (subscribe! her writing is worth it!) recently pointed out to me, Ukrainian migration to Canada has definitely been A Whole Thing. Those central provinces with their vast arable lands and temperate climate, their long cold winters and warm summers, were familiar to these agrarian immigrants, and the parklands of Canada similar enough to their homes in the Carpathian foothills that in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, Ukrainian setttlers formed communities in Alberta, in Manitoba, in Saskatchewan, and despite some struggles–such as internment as enemy aliens during World War I–Ukrainian immigration continued in waves throughout the 20th Century. As of the 2021 census, Ukrainian Canadians make up a notable percentage of the populations of these central provinces.

In other words, much like the German-Americans of Wisconsin hybridized their favorite sausage into the brat burger, the Ukrainian-Canadians of Alberta came up with the kubie burger.

Online mentions of the Kubie burger sandwich are rare and brief. Taste Atlas describes them as being served with “fried onions, creamy cheese spreads, caraway bacon sauerkraut, or cheddar cheese.” This “favorite Canadian sandwiches” piece on a manufacturer’s website repeats that description, and adds that the sandwich can be found on the menu “at almost any diner or burger shack around Alberta.”

That has not been my experience. I have not been to Alberta, but in the searches I’ve done for the past few weeks, and in looking through the menus of likely-seeming restaurants in Edmonton and Calgary, I did not find many–make that any–examples of the kubie burger to be prevalent, or even present. It seems that the burgers are not restaurant fare, not really, but are sold uncooked in premade patties by various Ukrainian butchers in Alberta, with Stawnichy’s, originally of Mundare, Alberta, the most well-known among them. (Though a commenter on Sandwich Dad’s Youtube above makes the claim that 30 years ago Soletski’s, another butcher shop in Mundare that has been closed for decades, was the king of Kubie burgers. Sadly I will never know.)

Uncle Ed’s, a diner attached to the Edmonton location of Stawnichy’s, does boast one of the rare sightings of a kubie burger on an Alberta restaurant menu. On their printed menu, it’s listed as being served with lettuce and tomato, though the entry on DoorDash lists a fuller complement of condiments (lettuce and tomato, relish, ketchup, mustard, and onions). Neither mentions creamy cheese spread, fried onions, sauerkraut, or cheddar, though a 2013 Facebook post from Edmonton’s Funky Mango food truck lists a “KUBBIE BURGER ON A BUN with Boursin and Cheddar Cheese and topped with Red Onions.” And in fact, as pointed out to me by the aforementioned Sandwich Dad, the cheese on many kubie burger photos you’ll find in online searched appears to be Swiss.

Stawnichy’s does sell their kubie patties online–for pickup only. With Edmonton a 25 hour drive from Chicago, that wasn’t going to work–and the makers of kubie patties aren’t exactly eager to share their recipes. But kovbasa recipes do exist online, and I adapted this recipe I found on a Ukrainian-American website.

I made 5 pounds worth and stuffed it into an 88mm artificial casing, letting it dry in the fridge overnight, and then smoking it over alder wood until 150° F, just cooked through–then sliced it into burger-sized disks to be finished on the grill. I’ve read that the commercially-made versions are cold-smoked, but I don’t currently have a good cold-smoking setup, and these turned out excellent (though if I were to make them again, I’d grind the pork more finely–I don’t think the kubie patties are quite as coarse as a traditional kovbasa).

I melted Swiss cheese atop a few of these while they were on the grill, and Muenster cheese on a few more. Some I left cheeseless. I served them on grilled hamburger buns with ketchup/pickle/onion/tomato/lettuce/mustard.

Nobody would ever confuse a brat burger for a hamburger made with ground beef, and the same is true here. But whereas a brat burger’s white color and aromatic flavor of mace and warm spices gives it away, the Prague powder I used helped the kubie pattie retain a pink color throughout, as seen in something like a standard kielbasa or other cured smoked sausage. The flavor is garlic, garlic, smoke, and more garlic, and that works just fine in this company–I’m not here to critique the standard American burger accompaniments but it’s a fairly full set of flavors and textures in itself, the sweet ketchup, sour and salty pickles, sharp and crisp onions, the pungent yellow mustard. Lettuce and tomato in themselves provide further sweet, sour, and bitter flavors as well as a fresh crunch.

There’s a familiarity to the combination that is comforting, but a universality to it as well–some or all of these flavors can enhance many a sandwich. Burgers, yes, but also chicken sandwiches and pork tenderloins. Maid-Rites and Sloppy Joes, fried bologna sandwiches, fried brain sandwiches, the list goes on. It should come as no surprise that they compliment a patty of sausage that is very much like a Polish kielbasa, crosshatched with seared grill marks and oozing with melted cheese.

Yet like with a brat burger, cheese seems wrong. Ketchup seems wrong. Tomatoes and lettuce don’t really seem right either. Sauerkraut and cooked onions on a smoked, cured, garlicky sausage–those do seem to fit. So I tried topping the kubie burger with onions slow-cooked with some butter until deeply brown and almost disintegrated and a sweetish, caraway flavored, bacon-studded sauerkraut as described by Taste Atlas.

And I can’t lie–this was great too. Salty, garlicky, porky sausage has few better partners than sauerkraut and onions. A spicy brown mustard would not have been unwelcome either. And I suppose I would not have hated cheddar or a creamy cheese spread, for that matter.

I can think of a lot of ways I’d enjoy a Kubie burger, maybe too many to cover in a single post on this site. But I’d love to hear from any Tribunal fans in Alberta, or any Albertans who happen to stumble across this post: how do you serve your kubie burgers?