Kasnocken

Snapshot

Egg-and-flour dumplings pan-fried with mountain cheese and caramelised onions until a golden crust forms at the bottom of the pan. The dish that fuelled lumberjacks in Alpine huts before it became a menu staple in every Salzburg restaurant.

The Story

Kasnocken are made from a simple egg-and-flour batter pressed through a coarse sieve into boiling salted water. The resulting dumplings, Nocken, are irregular and slightly rough-edged. Once they float, they are drained and transferred to a hot pan with clarified butter and sliced onions. The cheese goes in last, usually Pinzgauer Bierkäse, a semi-hard Alpine cheese with an assertive flavour, grated or cubed and folded through the pan until it coats the dumplings. The crust that forms at the bottom of the pan, the Printschn, is considered the best part by people who know what they are doing.

The dish comes from the hut tradition of Salzburg State: high-altitude, high-calorie, designed for people who had spent the morning doing physical work. It is vegetarian by default, which is not always obvious from how hearty it is. The Pinzgauer Kasnockn is a protected regional variant made specifically with Pinzgauer Bierkäse and Almkäse from the Pinzgau valleys; city versions use whatever mountain cheese is available. Both are worth ordering. The Pinzgau version is more assertive.

Where to try it

Stiftskeller St Peter and Barenwirt Salzburg serve reliable city versions. Krimpelstaetter in Mülln is a traditional neighbourhood Gasthaus where the Kasnocken come close to the hut original. For the full mountain context, any hut in Salzburg State above 1,500 metres will have them on the menu.