How to Eat Pølse – Norwegian Style
The Norwegian icon ‘pølse’ is just sausage similar to a Hot Dog or Frankfurter, however, at least 45 million kilograms of pølse (that’s 100kg of pølse per person) is eaten every year. Norway is the biggest sausage eating country per capita in the world! Pølse is THE fast food of Norway. They are sold at service stations, news agents, corner stores and fast food outlets.
Pølse are also eaten on special occasions such as children’s birthday parties or 17th May – Norway’s National Day. They are a must at every BBQ and often out shine a big steak or chop.
When the grilled pølse was first introduced to Norway in the 50s (via Denmark) it was eaten naked – without bread. Bread soon became an accompaniment, eaten on the side, but the influence of the Americans quickly put the pølse inside the bread.
Even though pølse is considered ‘lolly-meat’, there are strict requirements by the Food Safety commission for traditional ‘pølse’ to be of the highest quality and they have even set requirements for what types of ingredients are allowed to be used.
You’d be amazed how many ways you can eat a Norwegian sausage. There are the stereotypical ways, of course, like bread with ketchup and mustard but for so many sausages to be eaten in such a small country, the producers have certainly made an art out of re-inventing the humble pølse.
These days pølse can be eaten as a meal with potatoes, as a fry-up, in stew, or even in soup. (This is one of Farmor’s tricks to fill out her soup when she has the hungry boys -oops, men- home for dinner.) Some pølse are boiled and others grilled. Norway even has a Christmas pølse (Julpølse) which is baked and eaten with potatoes and gravy along side ribbs.
Christmas Eve dinner at Farmor’s with white julepølse and kjøttpølse.
But of course you have the grilled ‘hot dog’ style pølse. They come with an uncountable variety of condiments that are just plonked on top. Some unusual ones that I have found are: shrimp salad, potato salad, onion salad and gherkin salad.
Below are some quick recipes of the most common ‘pølse med brød’ (sausage with bread) that you’d find at the local fast food stores here in Norway that you can easily make yourself at home:
Pølse med salsa – Sausage with Salsa!
Just grill your sausage and put it in the bun. To make the salsa: Dice tomato, onion and continental cucumber. Mix with a dash of salt and pepper – a squeeze of lemon, if you like. I sometimes had some hot taco sauce for extra bite. Salsa is best when it is room temperature, especially when you put it on the pølse – cold salsa wouldn’t go well with hot pølse.
Pølse med Bacon – Sausage Wrapped in Bacon
This is a no-brainer. Wrap the grilled pølse in bacon and put it in the bun. Make sure the bacon isn’t cooked to a crisp otherwise it will crumble when you try to wrap it around the pølse.
Pølse med Sprøstekt Løk – Sausage Topped with Crispy Onion
In Norway you can buy crispy onions in a packet but to make your own… Chop the onions, roll them in a batter (like for fried fish or Corn Dogs), then fry them in a pan of oil til crispy. Make sure you drain them well. You could also have crispy bacon instead – dice the bacon and fry in a pan til crispy. Plonk on a pølse in a bun.
Pølse med Lompe – Sausage with Lompe
Lompe is a special type of traditional Norwegian bread made from potato. Anything and everything can get stacked into it as it is a flat bread which raps around your sausage. If you don’t have lompe you can use a tortilla, pita bread or any other flat bread. The best thing about using flat bread is it expands and you can fit a lot more condiments on – the skies the limit!
Pølse Kebaber – Sausage Kebabs
(Pictured first) This one isn’t sold in stores but it’s a fun way to eat pølse for the kids (and they get some vegies in them too ;D)
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Even though the males are called bulls and the females cows, the muskoxen are more closely related to sheep than cattle. Make no mistake, though – this is not your average cuddly ba-ba-blacksheep! A grown animal can be 2,5 m long and weigh up to 400 kgs, and their long curved horns mean business.
There is an opposition in everything. At the darkest time of the year, we celebrate Christmas. And at the exact opposite end, when the midnight sun is at its highest, we celebrate Midsummer.
Towards the water in a beautiful pocket of leafy oak trees is the Byneset Church.
The sun never goes down during this season but the mountains to the East are so high that the sun still has to raise above them in the morning hours and an artificial dawn-effect wakes the city.
I think I mentioned somewhere else on your blog how much I like pølse, and my favourite is with lompe. Here in the UK, we still eat pølse, but now we tend to eat them in a roll. A visit to IKEA usually ends with a “crispy” pølse smothered in mustard, with a dribble of ketchup!
Oh, and because they don’t sell julepølse here, I replace them at Christmas with German weißwurst!
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from L-Jay:
Pølse almost seems like a weekly diet here. However, I do miss beef sausages. in Oz we call them ‘snags’ and just wrap a slice of bread around. But they have come out with a lot of ‘gourmet’ pølse this Summer – cheese and bacon, chilli, garlic, bratwurst and Argentinean. I’m shy to say we have tried them all! lol. My favourite were the garlic ones.
I was raised by my grandparents from Norway and they made their own sausage but nothing tasted like plain old hotdogs. Tell me that this doesn’t taste like hotdogs!
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from L-Jay:
Well, they are no where near as nasty or cheap as the Australian Cheerio or Frankfurter that oozes fat – you know the ones you boil for kids birthday parties – yikes! Norwegian pølser are more like the hard compact gourmet (or skinless) ones. They are best grilled (you can boil if you want) but they keep a dense texture like ham and don’t go limp. Sooooo much better!
Where can i get the polse in the USA – i am interested in trying on the grill
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from L-Jay:
As far as we know, you can’t. But you might want to ry internatiional delicatessens – they might sell Norwegian brown cheese too. If you are anywhere near Minnesota (where a lot of the Norwegian-Americans live) you might find a store that imports Norwegian food. However, there is usually srict guidelines for imporing meat so it is very rare to do so. Good luck!
Thanks for sharing. I recently had them with lefse and crispy onions at a Scandinavian place here in the Pacific Northwest. Quite tasty!
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from L-Jay:
I don’t think I’ve had as many sausages in my life than I have while living here in Norway. I think they are growing on me –
hei pølse er det samme som hot-dog
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from L-Jay:
It’s the same concept – meat in bread – but the meat isn’t as nasty as the US ones as they have strict regulations on quality and meat content in Norway. This is to preserve the ‘Norwegianess’ of the pølser. In fact, they advertise that the pølser, when bent, is supposed to snap with a crisp sound. If they don’t you know you haven’t got the real deal. The Norwegian pølse was inspired by the Danish red sausage (not the American Hot Dog). In fact, the American Hot Dog was invented by immigrants who were selling wieners (a German sausage) a little too hot for the hands, so they wrapped them in bread because they had no serviettes.
Reality check – wow… isn’t is a little odd that an Aussie would know so much about the ‘Hot Dog’? (As they aren’t really eaten that much, except by kids, in Oz)…lol.
Only the “modern sausage”(the hot-dog type) was introduced to norway in the 1950′s. Traditional sausages that are more related to wurst have existed for a muuuuch longer time. There exists many variations of traditional sausages, each with it’s own “personality”. Vossakorv, Smoked Sausage or Medisterpølse for example.
Nowaday’s people often use “modern sausages” in the same meals as the traditional ones were(soups, stews etc.). So people are used to using sausages in many different ways, which is probably one of the reasons there is a lot of creativity in the use of “modern sausages” too. 
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from L-Jay:
Yes, I’ve noticed the pølse in the soup thing. They also do stir-fry pølse with potato and bacon etc, almost like the ‘bubble and squeak’ I know from back home. But pølse does seem more like a Summer food than Winter and is often used as a filler in meals.
I’ve never in my entire life seen anyone eat hot dogs with cucumbers or salsa. This observation is very odd.
Sol (born and raised in northern Norway)
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from L-Jay:
We buy them from Narvesen all the time
The typical “fast food” pølse in Norway is very different from the American hot dog. Not only does it require very high quality meat and production, but it is made with a mix of pork and beef. And, and this might come as a surprise, it contains less meat than American hot dogs. The best selling “wiener” in Norway consists of 54% meat plus 4% head meat — other ingredients include skim milk and potato starch. And spices, of course.
No, an almost 100% beef meat sausage is NOT good; it tastes rather boring and is way too chewy. All really good sausages around the world are made from mixtures and well-tried out ratios of ingredients. It’s how you mix them and how good the ingredients are that matters.
As for eating lefse with pølser, that’s an Norwegian-American thing. Norwegians just don’t use lefse that way (lefse is almost exclusively served with coffee, layered with a mix of butter and sugar stirred hard by hand, patiently, until bright white but without the sugar crystals broken up like if mixed in a mixer. This is too much hard work for American cuisine, which is presumably why N-As use lefse differently.)
Pølsemedlompeogrekesalat (pronounced as a single word) is a typical pub-crawler food, and like the kebab found in London, provides the necessary protein and calories for surviving the walk home (and if not, chunks for chucking up).
I love pølse too!
Hi, i went to Norway few years ago and i really miss those “polse”.I leave in France and does anyone know where i can buy some with the “lompe” ?Any website? (international delivery of course).THANKS
The first night in Norway we went to a 7/11 and had the Polse. They grilled the bun flat which makes sense. It was very good and I live in Wisconsin where Usingers makes award winning frankfurters.
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from L-Jay:
Yeah, they have a more smoky flavour than the ones we have back home in Oz and are certainly a lot better quality. (I wouldn’t recomend eating Hot Dogs in Australia…lol – go for a meat pie instead).
My family has developed a Norwegian/American tradition from our Norwegian ancestors on the Hauge farm in rural north central Iowa. Lefse and polse were traditional foods that were both relished and affordable especially through the depression and years after. So at some point they began taking their lefse and filling it with polse, rutabagas and potatoes. The name for this evidently has something to do with a hired hand named “Tillie” and how it affected his digestive system – as for as long as I can remember our family has looked forward to preparing and eating “Tillie Toots” for Christmas. I’m not certain if this is truth or a funny story they made up. Nonetheless, the smell of the boiling rutabagas has become the cherished essence of our holiday gatherings.
Until the early ’80s there was a family meat market in Clear Lake, IA that prepared the polse for us. When the man died, so did our ability to secure polsa for the annual gathering. My mother began using a mixture of ground pork breakfast sausage and ground beef – loose – that we would add to the potatoes and rutabagas. For years I have wondered if there were any other small meat producers that would have a similar recipe as to what we used to get. My most recent search has led me here.
If anyone knows where/how polsa might be available in the US, please let me know at mrsbeenk@hotmail.com.
Thanks!! How fun to read this article!
Lynn
I’ve recently been looking up sausages and I read a statistic that 70% of Australian households eat sausages at least once a week. So apparently we’re not shabby snag-eaters either! Andreas is quite amused by the amount of “sausage sizzles” all over the place here. Lately we’ve seem them at kindy, church, outside shops, at sports events.. everywhere you look, there they are – and often for free as well. Love it
Have to say I adore Norwegian “hot dogs” – the kind you get from the servo on a bun, with bacon wrapped around and cheese… YUM. I don’t mind Aussie ones either, but it’s funny cos we used to house American ministry teams here, and they would all peel the red skin off before eating our hot dogs, haha!
The reason I was looking up sausages though was because Andreas wanted to make “pølsegrateng” for us – his version is chopped up pølse, mash, macaroni, with cheese on top, baked in a casserole dish. Of course we couldn’t find anything close to the “middagspølse” he required so in the end he chose kabana cos he thought it looked the closest! It was still delicious but I hope to try it with the right sausage some day
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from L-Jay:
Kabana! I haven’t had that since leaving Australia. Kabana in pølsegrateng must have been interesting…lol. The skinless cheerios or hot dogs that you can buy at Safeway I think are similar to pølse – same density but with a smokier flavour.
I am 64 years old now, and my whole life from when we were kids, at Christmas time when the family would get together, my Grandmother, Mom, and her Sisters would all chip in to make what we knew as Polse. What it was (is) , was 15 lbs of finely grated potatoes, (done by hand back then……I use a food processor now) which in the big bowl looks like reddish brown soup. Then 9 cups of flour was added, 4 TBS salt, 1 1/4 Cup sugar, 1 tsp cinnamon, and 3 lbs of side pork cut in 1/2″ strips. After it was thoroughly mixed up, it was poured into water soaked cotton bags sewed from old sheets approx. 5″x18″ in size, and tied off on top with string. Then It was boiled in TALL pots for an hour. This made several “sausages” when taken out. It was allowed to cool and the bags were then cut off. It was wrapped in wax paper until ready for the meal. At mealtime, it was taken out and sliced into 1/2″ thick slices and fried in very hot grease until slightly golden brown………..taken out of the pan and put on paper towel to remove some of the grease. Then you would put butter and salt on and eat like there was no tomorrow. I still make it to this day and only a few of my Norwegian relation that are still alive and live in the same town I grew up in in Wisconsin, know what it is. I’ve never found another Norwegian who had ever heard of it. I have pictures I could put in if I knew how in this forum.
I would like to add that this recipe goes back the late 1800′s when my relatives came over from Norway.
Pølse are absolutely no different than a hotdog you buy in any store in north america, the UK etc. They are the lowest form of “meat”. They should never be mixed up with Sausage (real meat grounded and mixed with various spices).
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from L-Jay:
Hence the first line of the post: ‘pølse’ is just sausage similar to a Hot Dog or Frankfurter’. The Norwegian word ‘pølse’ directly translates to ‘sausage’ even though this ‘sausage’ is not the same understanding of ‘sausage’ as in the UK or US. It is the same difference with ‘thong’. In Australia it means a thin rubber shoe for the summer but in the US (and Norway) it means an underwear that has a string between the butt cheeks. It doesn’t mean one is right and the other is wrong – just different understandings. But if you think like a Norwegian ‘sausage’ would certainly not be wrong.
I can’t believe I had to wait until 2011 to discover the joys of pølse! There’s nothing in Britain that can match a lovely baconpølse from a kiosk after a hard day’s hiking. I’m quite partial to the crispy onion too, although I had no idea what it was when I first saw it
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from L-Jay:
If you don’t already know, you can buy the crispy onion by the bag at the supermarket. It is called Sprøstekt løk, and is usually near the powdered potato/spice section. It is only about 12kr too. Go mad!
So happy I actually found crispy onions in the shops a couple of days ago which got me thinking.. What are the various white sauces called that you have with pølse/burgers? It’s been two years since I was last in Norway. I want to see if I can recreate the experience here.
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from L-Jay:
Thousand Island dressing which is pinky-orange is the most popular for burgers. (It is generally called ‘hamburger dressing’. White sauces are generally garlic dressing, ‘hotdog’ dressing, Sour cream dressing, Bearnaise. They are almost all the same (white sauce/cream/mayo base) but with one different ingredient to call them different.
can anyone suggest how to buy norwegian food especially polsers lompe brod etc or if there is any norwegian restaurant beside ikea.. i live in washington dc area
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from L-Jay:
Ok – I’m going to say it before a Norwegian does…lol – Ikea isn’t Norwegian, it is Swedish. Swedes don’t have lompe and their sausages aren’t like Norwegian ones. Try a specialty goods market – usually those markets that sell butchered meats, farm produce and fresh dock fish can have a continental small goods section too.