Posted by Gaxette Enterprise, TX on October 21, 2008 at 12:01:24:
Marion crowns ‘world champion’ panas cook
By Ron Maloney
The Gazette-Enterprise
MARION — Luling has the watermelon.
In Seguin, we’re all nuts about pecans — as this weekend’s upcoming Pecan Fest shows.
In New Braunfels, for better or for wurst, the signature food is the sausage.
The city of Marion has hitched its star and its hopes for culinary cachet to a locally-produced staple — panas — and Saturday had to hang its collective chef’s coat and hat in shame.
That was because Brietzke’s Tavern owner John Bohannon came across Interstate 10 from New Berlin to take home the trophy for the world’s best panas at Marion’s first-ever world championship panas cookoff.
Hometown favorites David Goerke and Racheal and Gerard Reinhard tied for second, though, coming up one vote short of winning among those cast by more than 100 people who helped judge the three-way contest at Marion Trade Days.
“That was too close!” Bohannon exclaimed, admiring the trophy for the “World’s Best Panas” after holding it up for a photo opportunity for the news media covering the cookoff.
Racheal Reinhard — even as as she and Goerke congratulated Bohannon — put him on notice for next year.
“You’d better be ready to defend it,” she said. “I’m going to take that trophy away from you!”
Panas is a meat and meal-based loaf dish typically sliced, fried and served for breakfast. It came to the United States with German immigrants who called it pawn haas or pon haus and saw it as a way to be sure to use up scraps of meat left over from the butchering process that, while still tasty and fit for consumption, might not be attractively presented on a plate.
Translate that to mean the head of the animal — usually boiled whole until the meat falls from the bones — or other parts you probably enjoy nearly every day in a hot dog or a sausage, but don’t really think about.
“Beef and pork — let’s leave it at that,” Bohannon said when one woman asked.
Goerke said families traditionally slaughtered their hogs with the passing of the first cold front of fall, and while making their bacon, sausage and other products, they would throw the bones in an iron pot and boil the remaining scraps of meat off of them.
Other parts of the animal — including the liver, kidneys and many others — would be included. Any kind of meat can be used, and local panas also often contains beef and venison. There are even stories of more exotic recipes involving turkeys or other game.
“The whole thing is, they didn’t let anything go to waste,” Goerke said.
Once boiled or picked off the bones, the meat is ground up and seasoned with salt, pepper, paprika and, by some cooks, other spices including thyme or savory.
In his winning recipe passed down from Walter and Dee Dee Brietzke, Bohannon used red pepper, garlic salt and garlic, as well.
Then it is returned to the stock or broth it was cooked in, and corn meal, oil and flour is stirred in and heated until it gets just dry enough to no longer grip the pot, when it is turned out into loaf pans and cooled. It can be refrigerated or frozen, and must “set up” or “gel” overnight to be ready to serve.
Some garnish it with ketchup, salsa, syrup or fruit preserves. At Trade Days, though, the contestants were serving it straight up.
“It’s a two-day job,” Goerke said, deftly flipping brownish-gray slices on a portable electric griddle. “My father, Freddie Goerke, made this yesterday.”
Sliced about a quarter-inch thick, it was crispy and made a bold, peppery statement with just a hint of warm fry oil that left a long finish on the palate.
Bohannon’s product looked about the same and was sliced to a similar thickness and had been prepared to a very similar texture.
But the taste was more subtle and sublime, leaving one to ponder the proportions of meat and spices.
Reinhard’s recipe was served thicker — about half an inch — and as a result was more moist in the center and crisp around the edges. Its seasoning was more nuanced than Goerke’s, as well.
But don’t ask any of the cooks for the weight of the ingredients or the proportions of the seasonings they use or how long they boil it, stir it or cure it.
It’s not that the information is secret like the recipe for Coca-Cola or Kentucky Fried Chicken, which recently had to be moved by armed guards.
It’s that none of them know because they just cook panas intuitively out of long practice, and the ingredients sometimes shift a little, depending on what happens to be in the fridge, the pantry or the freezer.
In Bohannon’s case, he makes 70 or 80 pounds of panas at a time. He doesn’t serve it at Brietzke’s — that’s a one-year supply for his family. He tosses the spices in and knows when there’s enough by their feel, their look and the taste of the meat.
It’s really the same for everybody, the other cooks agreed.
“Every family has its own recipe, and the recipe changes a little bit as they pass it down.” Racheal Reinhard said. “Ours comes down from my husband’s family — he’s born and raised in Marion.”
In the Reinhard family, though, two things that don’t change are the heirloom iron pot and the big wooden flattened stick used to stir the panas that is of about perfect proportion for educational applications, as well.
“This is more than 100 years old,” she said. “It’s like, the ‘sacred stick’ in our family. All the kids know what it is.”
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