Dublin Coddle
Oct 26th, 2009 by mark
Shortly after moving to Kansas City I discovered a dish called “Dublin Coddle.” It’s a meat-and-potato-lovers dream soup. I’ve not made it in a very long time and wanted to try it again. Over the weekend we gathered the ingredients but ended up not making it. It needs to cook long and slow which lends itself to weekend cooking but not so much during the week. Then Sibylle suggested I make it at lunch and let it cook all afternoon. So that’s what I did and it turned out beautifully.
I suppose you could do this in a crock pot, but ours is the large economy size, and works best when it’s two-thirds full or more. So today I made coddle in an oven-proof 3-quart pan with a light fitting lid.
Ingredients
- 1 pound or so sausage links
- 6 medium large red skin potatoes
- 1 medium onion
- 1 or 2 carrots (optional, and likely not traditional)
- 3 or 4 slices of bacon
- 1 cup or thereabouts of beef broth
Preparation
Preheat oven to 250º.
Slice the bacon into 1-inch pieces and put into pan with beef broth. Cut the sausage into bite-sized pieces and add to broth mixture. Bring to a boil and then simmer for 5 minutes.
Wash the potatoes. We like the skins so I leave them on. Slice the potatoes into thick slices. Peel and slice the onion into disks.
Remove the sausage and bacon from the broth and reserve the broth in a bowl for now. Cover the bottom of the pan in a layer of potatoes. Add a layer of onion and bacon, using half of each. Cover that with half the sausage. Repeat with another layer of potatoes, onions, bacon and the rest of the sausage. Cover the top with the last of the potatoes. If you add carrots sprinkle them into each layer of sausage.
Re-add the reserved broth and place in the oven at 250º for several hours. I cooked mine for 5 hours and it was perfect.
Serve hot, perhaps with thick bread.
Notes
I didn’t add any seasoning either in preparation or presentation. The salt from the bacon, the sweetness from the onion, and the seasonings from the sausage combine to create a wonderful flavor. I used sweet Turkey Italian sausage for this batch, you could substitute any other coarse or crumbly sausage I think.
Next time I want to try some leeks for a little added color and flavor.