Carnivore opened late last summer, and we’ve been there a few times to pick up meat and fish.
The boys at Carnivore now also offer lunch. Stopping in for a sandwich is a good way to sample their hand-crafted wurst.
We recently had a sandwich of weisswurst and a sandwich of Andouille sausage, both very good and made-in-house, like just about almost everything else that’s sold at Carnivore.
Weisswurst, or white sausage, is mild and covered in sweet mustard with a drape of very soft, tender and only mildly acidic sauerkraut. Weisswurst is sausage with a heritage going back a century and a half to Munich. As the story goes, a butcher in the Bavarian city was preparing to make bratwurst when he discovered he didn’t have all the ingredients he needed, so he threw together what he had: veal, pork, bacon, onions, salt, pepper and lemon powder. He called his creation weisswurst, and traditionally this sausage is served in a bowl of hot water, to keep the wieners from cooling down. The sausage is sometimes even squirted out of its skin before it’s eaten. At Carnivore, it’s cooked on a stove and served in a bun, sliced down the center so the meat is more evenly distributed (a simple move that makes all the difference when eating a sausage sandwich).
Andouille, a sausage usually associated with the Cajun culinary tradition Louisiana, is French in origin, and it traditionally incorporated offal like chitterlings and tripe, though none of those meats were in evidence in Carnivore’s version. Served in a bun, we had this sausage with peperonata, a slightly spicy blend of stewed peppers and onion. This is not exactly a spicy sausage, but it packs a lot more spice than the weisswurst, and for that reason I liked it a little more.
Both sausage sandwiches were eight bucks a piece and very big. As Carnivore offers a rotating list of sausages, you can have them make you a sausage sandwich with any sausage in the cooler. Other menu items include a pulled pork sandwich and a hamburger, all made to order.
