Kürbisfest Kickoff! Sausage-Stuffed Butternut

It’s the most wonderful time of the year!

When I picked out these mini Butternutkürbisse (butternut squashes–please note the Denglish is not my invention), I envisioned a simple side dish for a meal off the grill. But then the weather turned cold, and chaos set in. One of the punkins broke their seal, which means it had to be used.

Time to get complex.

Roasting and filling is the easiest and fastest way to prepare pumpkin varieties with inedible skin. We’d had a lot of cheese- and tomato-based dishes over the previous week as cold-weather comfort food, so I looked for recipes with other flavor profiles. You know what’s crazy? My English-language searches brought me meats, cheeses, and sweets; German-language searches gave me mostly vegan results (Austrians still use sugar, cream, and cheese). I settled on savory sausage with apples, a classic American fall flavor combo.

I have no idea where this anonymous blogger is based–she’s writing in English, but she implies that “sausage” and “ground beef” are interchangeable, which any native Midwesterner can tell you is factually wrong–but the recipe looked structurally sound based on all I learned during Kürbisfest 2023. Just had to rewrite it first, remove the condescending bits so it would all fit on one printed page for my ever-expanding grimoire.

A note about “sausage”: neither the Southern version you buy in a chub for in biscuits and gravy nor the Italian version beloved as a pizza topping exist in Germany. There is no loose sausage of any kind available to normal consumers, it is all stuffed into casings and cooked. Fortunately, copycat recipes exist. I wanted to use all pork, but I was too lazy to chase around to different supermarkets when my local was out, so I used the mixed pork-beef blend that’s traditionally used in local meatballs.

Bonus! I got to buy Salbei gerebelt (rubbed sage) to season the meat. I didn’t expect to find it, because I’ve never seen it used in a German recipe. Fall just got better!

A note about “raisins”: I couldn’t find any Rosinen (raisins) in the supermarket, but they had Sultaninen and Korinthen, which I could clearly see from the packaging were both just raisins. Having no idea what makes them different, I bought one of each. Turns out they are different grape varieties from different regions—Sultaninen from Turkey and Korinthen from Greece–and you use the Greek one in desserts and the Turkish one in main course dishes. Naturally, I used the wrong one 🙂 but the Sultaninen looked and tasted more like the ones from the red boxes handed out to small children in the 1970s so they’d be quiet in church. Ahem.

“Fast” is relative; the roasting still takes 40 minutes, but you use this time to prepare the filling. For apple, I used a Granny Smith, and it stayed fairly crisp.

Since the celery-and-sausage reminded me of a cornbread stuffing recipe I loved but can’t find again, I made some cornbread to go with it. It wasn’t needed, though. The half squash with the meat was more than enough for satiety.

A note on reheating: I covered the pan with foil before popping it in the oven for 20 minutes at 180°C, but the filling still dried out. Maybe add some water to the pan next time.

A super start to Kürbisfest 2024! Plenty of pumpkin action remains!