Kod Varge

An oval dry sausage from the Croatian part of Baranja, between the Danube and the lower Drava, protected as an EU geographical indication since 2015. Lean pork, at least 80% of it ham and loin, with 10% fat, seasoned with salt, sweet and hot paprika, garlic and white pepper. The casing is the pig's caecum, the katica, and nothing else is allowed. Each kulen weighs at least 0.8 kg. The specification calls the taste mildly hot, led by cold smoke, with garlic and pepper kept in the background. The white pepper is what sets it apart from kulen made elsewhere in the region.

The blood sausage of the Croatian pig slaughter. In Slavonia it holds no grain at all: cooked pig head, skin, lungs, heart, spleen and tongue, red onion fried in lard, and the blood, seasoned with salt, hot paprika and black pepper. Further north the recipe changes. Zagorje adds rice, Prigorje barley, and Međimurje fills its čurke with buckwheat or millet. In Slavonia the sausages come out of the pot at the kolinje evening meal, and later they are baked whole in lard and eaten with sauerkraut and fried potatoes. Some go into the smokehouse with the other sausages and end up sliced cold on a platter.

Slavonia's everyday sausage: lean pork with up to 30% firm fat, salt, sweet and hot paprika and garlic, filled into thin pork intestine and cold-smoked. The EU registered the name as a protected geographical indication in 2023. The protected product is the dried one, sold as a pair: one long casing twisted in the middle and folded into two halves of at least 35 cm each. At home the same sausage changes its job as it ages. Freshly smoked, it goes into the pan or onto the grill and comes with plain sour cream. Half-dried, it cooks in gulaš and sarma. Fully dried, it gets sliced cold.