In case you are not from Cincinnati, let me clue you in on Goetta. It is a German-inspired breakfast dish. Cincinnati and its general vicinity were settled by Germans in the early 19th Century. If you were to ask a modern German, they would have no clue what Goetta is. Around Cincinnati, the stuff is famous. It had fallen into relative obscurity until a resurgence in Northern Kentucky in the past 20 years or so. Now, it is being served in a lot of local restaurants in the same way other places would serve hash browns.  There’s even an annual GoettaFest.

Goetta is a fairly simple dish. You take cooked oatmeal and mix in ground meat and some ground pork. Season it like you would breakfast sausage and fry it up in a patty. I throw a patty of it in the Panini maker and fry both sides at the same time. A waffle iron with the plates flipped to the smooth griddle side makes a perfect Goetta fryer.

I fell in love with Goetta about a decade ago. My mother and grandmother would make it when I was a kid, but I never liked it. When I tried it in a restaurant as a grizzled adult, I found out why it had not worked for me as a child: it had not been cooked long enough. They had left the outside somewhat blond and the inside rather mushy. That makes sense because that was how the family made fried mush (didn’t like that either).  The way I like it is dark brown on the outside.

Most recipes us ground pork, but if you haunt the back of the sausage case, you’ll find cheap breakfast sausage that has more than the usual amount of fat.  That’s the stuff I use.  Buy the hot stuff– it mixes in well.  The whole point here is that venison is much drier than beef, so you have to make up for it with extra fat in the pork and I add beef fat as well.

I’ve just recently tried to make my own with great success. Here is my recipe:

• 2 1/2 Cups  Steel Cut Oats
• 6 Cups Water
• 1TBS  Sea Salt
• 1TSP  Pepper
• 1/4 TSP  Paprika
• 1 Large Onion –I like to puree mine in a food processor
• 1 lb  Ground Venison
• 1 lb  Hot Pork Sausage — Cheap and fatty works best
• 2 TBS  Beef Suet –optional  I threw it in with the onion
• 2 TBS Cooking oil

Boil the water on the stove. Add in Oats, the onion, salt, pepper, and paprika.  After the oats take up all the water, transfer to a crockpot. Set to Hi.  Add in venison and pork sausage.  Cook for 1 hour on HI and then turn down to LO.  Cook for 3 more hours.

Winter is a good time for making Goetta, because the next step is to cool the stuff down. I put mine in a large metal baking pan and put it out in the garage for 4 hours. You could just as easily put it in your backyard grill overnight. It just needs to chill and solidify. Some folks use greased bread pans.

The standard way to make Goetta is to transfer the chilled, solidified block onto wax paper and then cut it into portions, or wrap the block up and store it in the refrigerator. I had a patty press, and dialed up an 8 oz portion, and then pressed the Goetta into perfect patties. These I stacked between sheets of waxed paper and froze.

To cook up a patty, most people fry it in a pan in leftover bacon grease. As I said previously,  I use a Panini maker and cook it the same way I would bacon or sausage patties. One 8oz patty is enough for me for a whole breakfast. Most folks eat smaller patties as a side to bacon and eggs and such. I season mine to taste with Creole Seasoning as I’m cooking it– just a sprinkle.

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