Makkara

Makkara is the Finnish word for sausage.

Makkara is typically similar in appearance to Polish sausages or bratwursts, but have a very different taste and texture. Most makkara is very light on spices and is therefore frequently eaten with mustard, ketchup, or other table condiments without a bun. Makkara is usually grilled, roasted over coals, or cooked on sauna heating stones until the outer skin begins to darken and crack. A special kind of makkara is mustamakkara, a "Black sausage", which is a speciality of Tampere and its surroundings. It is very close to the Scottish black pudding.

Makkara is a very broad term for basically everything edible stuffed in a sausage-shaped natural or artificial skin. It can be a traditional "halpa makkara" (cheap sausage, class B) including relatively little meat but a lot of saturated fats and flour. On the other end there are class A sausages with high quality meat stuffing. And everything between. Increasingly popular vegetarian and nutritionally unorthodox sausages fall without problems in the category of "makkara" as long as they maintains the "sausagy" shape. For example, blood sausage or "verimakkara". When rice or grain is mixed with the sausage mass, it becomes "ryynimakkara". The 21st century has seen the rise of spiced makkaras; the usual spices are cheese, tomato, garlic, chili and pepper.

Makkara can be eaten raw, boiled or cooked in microwave oven, or fried on pan, in oven or grilled. It is said the most Finnish way of spending an evening together is on the shore of a lake or sea, frying makkara over an open fire. The traditional beverage in such party is beer. When makkara is eaten inside a sliced, fried bun with cucumber salad, it becomes a porilainen after the town of Pori.

Pickled makkara intended to consumed as slices is called kestomakkara. This class includes various metwurst, salami and Balkanesque styles. The most popular kestomakkara in Finland is meetvursti, which contains finely ground full meat, ground fat and various spices. It is not unlike salami, but usually thicker and less salty.