Karls' Sausage

On New Year's Eve, just before cooking up quite the feast, Lynne, Han, A. and I headed up to Saugus to visit Karl's Sausage. A Boston-area institution since 1958, Karl's offers a wide array of tradition German meats, house-cured bacon, and imported goods. They have a German mustard (like the stein pictured above), German gummi snacks, German cookies, German breads . . . you get the idea. It is a mecca for German food lovers. In addition to picking up bacon for New Year's brunch, and a cured meat that I can't remember the name of (but it was smoky and delicious) we also snagged a few links of bauernwurst and weisswurst. We cooked both up a few days later - the weisswurst is boiled, and the casing is removed before eating. We split the bauernwurst, the grilled it in a cast iron grill pan. The weisswurst was really mild and soft, while the bauernwurst was a heartier, meatier sausage. Both were perfect, paired with a white beer, and best enjoyed on a cold winter day!