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Wurstmarkt Favorite · Stuffed Pork Belly

Saumagen

Saumagen — street food from Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany
Photo: Claus Ableiter / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0

Former Chancellor Helmut Kohl was famous for serving it to visiting world leaders, including Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher — turning a farmhouse dish into an inadvertent diplomatic calling card.

A pig's stomach is stuffed with a coarse mix of pork, potato, and marjoram, poached, then sliced into rounds and pan-fried until the edges crisp. It's a fixture at the Bad Dürkheim Wurstmarkt — despite the name, actually the world's largest wine festival — where it's sold sliced from big pans.

Why it's made this way: It began as farmhouse thrift, using the stomach as an edible casing to stretch scraps of meat and potato into a filling meal.
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Part of World of Street Food — 690 dishes from 118 countries. Something wrong here? Tell us in the comments below. Photo credits.