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Krautburgers fit a lot into a tasty handheld bread pocket.
More than just a quirk of northern Colorado cuisine, they’re a time capsule — filled with beef, onions and cabbage, but also the weight of hundreds of years of history and thousands of miles of emigration.
Krautburgers help carry on the story of a people who left a home in what is now Germany to settle in Czarist Russia, then came to the New World where they helped build the agricultural communities of northern Colorado and nearby states.
Opportunities to try a krautburger are increasingly rare, though there are a handful of restaurants, bakeries, grandmas and church fundraisers that still offer a taste of the old country wrapped in a thin casing of baked dough.
Known as cabbage burgers, krautburgers, bierock, krautbierock, krautrunza, and probably other names depending on one’s family history and what village their ancestors hailed from, they were offered in restaurants, food trucks, school lunches and church fundraisers in the largely agricultural communities of northeastern Colorado, according to Cheryl Glanz, who volunteers with the state chapter and the national American Historical Society of Russians from Germany.
“CSU used to have them in one of the resident halls,” she said of the university in Fort Collins. “UC Health, Poudre Valley Hospital used to have great krautbierock. There was a variation of krautburger we used to get at school. I’m sure all the school systems had them, if they didn’t call them outright krautburger, they were some sort of variation. It was essentially our burrito.”
Want the recipe? Jump to an old one we found from the 1970s.
How beet farming brought the krautburger to Colorado
The krautburger’s migration to northeastern Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, and even Canada and South America, has its roots in the second manifesto of Catherine the Great, the German-born empress of Russia. Issued in 1763 following the devastation of the Seven Years War, the manifesto was aimed at drawing residents of what is now Germany to the Volga River area of Russia so they could farm and help feed the Russian people.
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Read moreThe manifesto offered special dispensations to those who migrated to Russia, including the freedom of religion, the right to maintain their own language, and exemptions from taxes and military service. That changed a century later as many of these exemptions were rolled back, and a large number of German-descended farmers departed in search of greener pastures.
Germans from the Volga region began migrating to the New World in the latter half of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s. They brought Turkish red wheat to the plains of Calgary, Canada, were recruited by the railroad companies in the Midwest, and formed insular communities in parts of South America.
Glanz said the U.S. diaspora of Germans from Russia corresponds with areas that had vibrant wheat and sugar beet production, including farther north and west to California, Oregon, Washington, and Montana, as well as a smattering on the East Coast. “It’s pretty eye opening when you see where we’ve spread to,” she said.
A large number of Germans from Russia landed in Kansas and Nebraska, particularly the rail hub in Lincoln, Nebraska, where Germans from Russia founded the Runza sandwich chain based on their family’s culinary traditions. (There is but one Runza remaining in Colorado, in Loveland, where the menu is anchored by the original-recipe Runza and five modern variants.)
Many Germans from Russia were subsequently recruited to farm sugar beets in Colorado. Charles Boettcher, founder of the Great Western Sugar Company (along with many other ventures), recognized the potential for sugar beets on a trip to Germany and helped bring the industry to the state in the early 1900s.
“The story we’ve been told is that he left Germany with a suitcase full of sugar beet seeds,” Glanz said. “He realized there were people in Lincoln, Nebraska, who had experience. We grew sugar beets in Russia, and that’s how we ended up getting recruited here to Colorado.”
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SUBSCRIBEShe said the first settlement of Germans from Russia was in Denver’s Globeville neighborhood, and most of early Windsor came from the same Russian village, Dönhof. She added that many of the homes in the historic Buckingham and Andersonville neighborhoods in Fort Collins — located around the old sugar beet factory — share some architectural styles common in Russia.
“We actually were the second-largest ethnic minority in the state of Colorado until the 1990s,” Glanz said. However, the language and much of the culture wasn’t passed on due to widespread xenophobia surrounding the two world wars and the Cold War.
“A lot of families wouldn’t talk about it. There was a genuine fear of retribution and being deported,” she said. “During the world wars, my great-grandma used to tell me stories about how you could not speak German in public in Fort Collins. Men were either jailed or beaten for it.”
She said she looked at some of the English-language primers her grandmother learned from, and they included phrases such as “A German is a bad person,” “A German is a murderer” and “A German is a baby-killer.”
“That’s a big piece of why assimilation was a big deal to us,” she said.
Culinary traditions were sacrosanct, however
The food was passed down, though, a reminder of their roots. Robin Lauer-Trujillo said her family is Germans from Russia on both sides. Ancestors on her dad’s side worked in the sugar beet industry near Sterling, while her mom’s side landed in western Kansas.
“Krautburgers were always like special occasion food for our family,” she said. “It was always Christmas Eve and New Year’s and that kind of thing.”
LEFT: Robin Lauer-Trujillo prepares krautburgers at Lauer-Krauts in Brighton. RIGHT: Bread pudding and German chocolate brownies wait to be served. (Jeremy Sparig, Special to The Colorado Sun)
She’d been working in the corporate world and grew to hate it, and decided to change course. Looking back on learning to make sauerkraut — or Lauerkraut, as they called it — from her dad, who had learned it from his dad, and her mom’s “magic” abilities in the kitchen, she decided to start a restaurant, Lauer-Krauts in Brighton, serving krautburgers and other traditional fare.
They still use her grandpa Lauer’s hobel, which is like a giant mandolin slicer for cutting cabbage.
Corey Schwartz said the krautburger’s rustic, working-person’s roots haven’t entirely faded from the local lore. “A lot of people called them cabbage pockets because, back in the day, the farmers didn’t have a lot of money,” he said. “Often they didn’t have meat. And so they would just do these with steamed cabbage, onions and stuff. A lot of times you put whatever meat in there you could, if you had meat. I talked to a customer and they said they made them with rutabagas.”
Schwartz said his parents had grown up with krautburgers, and they decided to begin selling them to friends and family in the late 1980s when his mother was recovering from a car accident and his dad had been laid off but wasn’t ready to retire.
They found a little storefront property in Evans, and Schwartz’s Krautburger Kitchen was born.
Schwartz’s recipe is simple, relying on steamed cabbage combined with browned ground beef, onions and seasonings. The exterior is made from a handmade sweet bread dough, and after a long rising process the dough is cut into smaller pieces, wrapped around the stuffing, and baked.
“I tell people that some of our favorite customers are the people who make the krautburgers themselves because they realize how long it takes to make,” he said. “It’s not throwing a hamburger on the grill for 57 seconds and calling it done or something, but it literally takes hours to make. We have a food truck now, and we have a little sign on the food truck that says, ‘Hours to make, quick to serve.’”
Customers order and eat meals at Lauer-Krauts Kraut Burger on March 25 in Brighton. (Jeremy Sparig, Special to The Colorado Sun)Schwartz’s krautburgers aren’t limited to the traditional varieties, though. They have one with cheese, and another with jalapenos and cheese. (Corey thought it was blasphemy when his parents first introduced the diced jalapenos, but now finds himself eating that one consistently.)
“My dad was always having fun in the kitchen and he’d make a pizza krautburger, where you put pepperoni and pizza sauce in there and a few other things,” he said. “We’ve done corned beef and cabbage ones for St. Patrick’s Day in the past. We’ll have corned beef and some carrots and cabbage and potatoes inside, stuffed inside so it’s like a meal inside a pocket. Sometimes we’ll make a chicken and broccoli one. We’ve done a lot over the years.”
As traffic in Evans slowed, they decided to open a second location in Greeley in 2017. The original Evans space is now closed, but the bigger Greeley space allows them to offer a variety of additional German foods. Menu items might include various iterations of spaetzle — with cheese sauce or brown gravy, steamed vegetables, sliced bratwurst — as well as a bratwurst of the week, German potato salad, schnitzel, rouladen, red cabbage, and desserts such as German chocolate cake, Black Forest cake, cinnamon rolls, grebbel and rival kuga.
Dishes that evoke big feelings
Lauer-Trujillo has also incorporated other dishes into Lauer-Kraut’s rotating menu of daily specials, but homed in on green bean soup and bean and noodle soup — both ham-based with cream added to the broth — as special items, from family recipes, on the menu.
“Everything that we make are all family recipes,” she said. “All of our desserts people love to come for, but those two soups are probably, in the way of tradition and legacy, it would be those two soups.”
Lauer-Krauts also has krautburger varieties with cheese, but when Lauer-Trujillo talks about what makes their krautburgers unique, it’s simple: “Our lauerkraut. Our homemade sauerkraut. That’s our thing.” It’s a fermented touch — nothing but shredded cabbage and salt, aged for four weeks — to an otherwise simple mixture of ground Angus chuck beef, cabbage and onion. The dough is also simple, a basic bread dough using all-purpose flour and just a little sugar to give the yeast a boost. They use the same dough for their cinnamon rolls and kuga, also.
Lauer-Trujillo and Schwartz find themselves introducing younger visitors to German or Volga Russian dishes, while also providing a taste of tradition for the older generations who have fewer and fewer places to find it now.
Schwartz said he avoids the words “kraut” or “cabbage” with younger eaters, simply calling it a pocket. They used to bring samples to the county’s Taste of Weld event and talk younger attendees into trying a bite of krautburger with their hot dog or slice of pizza, then see those same visitors come back for another sample later. But he also deals with orders on food delivery services with requests such as, “I’d like a traditional krautburger without the kraut, please,” he said. “We just chuckle.”
“One of my sons, he had a friend that tried it for the first time and he said, ‘Wow, this is awesome in a pocket,’” Schwartz said. “So if you go into our restaurant, as you walk in the door, it’s painted on the back wall, it says, ‘Awesome in a Pocket.’”
Lauer-Trujillo said they see a range of customers from the nearby high school kids to the older Germans from Russia who grew up on the cuisine. For the younger crowd, the flavor and the use of real ingredients are a big draw.
“I think a lot of people are willing to have real cream and stuff that’s made fresh and homemade versus something that you dump out of a bag or a can,” she said.
Lauer-Krauts has also been featured multiple times on the Food Network show “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” and its spinoffs.
The first was in 2011 (Episode 2, Season 12), followed by a re-airing of that content in a best-of show. Lauer-Krauts was also featured in a follow-up episode of “Triple D Nation,” as well as a pandemic episode of “Triple D Takeout,” where they remotely taught Guy and Hunter Fieri how to make the restaurant’s Sinnamon Rolls.
Lauer-Trujillo also sees how the flavors resonate with the locals from old Volga German families coming in, though. She said one gentleman who works for the post office came in and kept looking back toward the kitchen while he was eating. She eventually asked if there was something he was looking for, and he told her, “My mom passed five years ago, but I know she’s back there cooking because this tastes just like her food.”
Products for sale in the Lauer-Krauts dining room include egg noodles used in the restaurant’s soups. (Jeremy Sparig, Special to The Colorado Sun)
She had another woman come in shortly after they opened, and they had a blackberry kuga — a German-style coffeecake made with special berries called schwarzberries, or schwartzbeeren — on the menu.
“They’re these little teeny tiny blackberries, and you might know what they are, but unless you know the flavor, you don’t like it,” she explained. “There was a little lady, an older lady, and she was sitting in the restaurant eating a piece of the blackberry kuga, and she just was crying. I knew her, and I said, ‘Ruth, what’s wrong?’ I went and sat with her, and she said, ‘I didn’t think I’d ever have this taste again before I died.’
“And I just sat and cried with her. It’s my favorite thing when people say this is like my mom’s or like my grandma’s or it gives me this memory or something, that’s absolutely my favorite thing to hear,” Lauer-Trujillo said. “Things like that are just the reason why I keep doing it.”
Kraut Bierock (Bierok)
Commonly known as Krautburgers
This recipe is transcribed verbatim from a photocopied, typewritten recipe from the 1970s provided by American Historical Society of Russians from Germany.
Lauer-Krauts’ recipe, featured on Food Network, can be found here.
1 package (13 3/4 ounces) hot roll mix 1 lb hamburger 1 large onion, diced 1 small head cabbage, chopped 1/8 teaspoon pepper [illegible, 3/8?, 1/2?] teaspoon salt 1/9 teaspoon monosodium glutamate 1. Prepare roll mix according to package directions. Let rise 45 minutes. 2. Combine beef, onion and cabbage and cook slowly, uncovered, until tender (30 minutes). Drain. 3. Place dough on floured board and knead. Roll dough 1/8 inch thick and cut into 5 inch squared. Place 2 to 3 tablespoon meat mixture in center of square. Fold corners together and pinch to seal along seams of dough. Place sealed seam side down on greased cookie sheet. Brush tops and sides of buns with oil. Cover and let rise 15 minutes. 4. Bake in preheated oven 400 degrees for 20 minutes or until golden brown. Serve hot. Yield: Approximately 14 krautburgers. Krautburgers from Lauer-Kraut Kraut Burger in Brighton. (Jeremy Sparig, Special to The Colorado Sun) Read More Details
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