Stuffed derma is a traditional Ashkenazi Jewish dish made from a casing stuffed with flour or matzo meal, rendered chicken fat (schmaltz), and spices. It’s also widely known as kishke, a Slavic word meaning “gut” or “intestines,” which points to its origins as a sausage made from actual beef intestines. The name “stuffed derma” comes from German-speaking Jewish communities, and you’ll still hear it used among Jews with German ancestry.
What Goes Into Stuffed Derma
The filling is simple and starchy: flour or matzo meal forms the base, schmaltz provides richness, and the seasoning typically includes salt, paprika, and black pepper. Many versions also include grated onion, carrot, and celery, which add moisture and flavor to what would otherwise be a dense, bread-like log. Some cooks fold in extras like grated sweet potato, fresh thyme, or garlic.
Traditionally, the casing was cleaned beef intestine. Today, most home cooks and commercial producers skip the intestine entirely. The filling is shaped into a log, wrapped tightly in parchment paper and then aluminum foil, and baked or simmered. The result is the same dense, savory roll, just without the butcher-shop step of sourcing and cleaning casings.
Why It Exists: A Frugal Kitchen Staple
Kishke was born out of resourcefulness. Historically, it was essentially a Jewish sausage stuffed with leftovers and a binder, then slow-cooked overnight in cholent, the traditional Sabbath stew. It was a way to make sure nothing went to waste and stretch a small amount of food into something filling. North African and Kurdish Jewish communities sometimes added chopped offal or meat to their kishke. Wealthier Eastern European Jews occasionally did the same.
Modern Ashkenazi kishke, however, is almost always made without meat. Jewish culinary historian Joel Haber has noted that this shift may be tied to kosher dietary laws. Since many synagogue lunches are dairy meals, kishke needed to drop the meat to remain permissible at the table. The result is a dish that’s technically pareve (neither meat nor dairy) when made with oil instead of schmaltz, making it versatile for kosher meal planning.
How It’s Cooked
Stuffed derma can be baked on its own, but its most iconic role is inside a pot of cholent. Cholent is a slow-cooked Sabbath stew of beans, potatoes, barley, and meat, prepared before sundown on Friday and left to cook overnight so observant families have a hot meal on Saturday without needing to light a fire. The kishke log goes into the pot at the start and cooks for anywhere from 12 to 17 hours on very low heat, typically around 200°F in the oven or on a slow cooker’s low setting.
After that long, slow cook, the exterior develops a dark, caramelized crust while the inside stays soft and rich, having absorbed the meaty broth from the stew around it. When sliced into rounds, the cross-section looks a bit like a dense stuffing with a golden-brown edge. Baked on its own (usually about an hour at 350°F), kishke is lighter and firmer, more like a savory bread roll than the meltingly soft cholent version.
Nutritional Profile
Stuffed derma is calorie-dense for its size. A single cubic inch (about 18 grams) contains roughly 83 calories, with 65% of those calories coming from fat. That small portion has about 6 grams of fat, 6 grams of carbohydrate, and less than 1 gram of protein. It’s not a protein source. It’s a rich, starchy side, and a typical serving of a few slices adds up quickly. The fat content comes almost entirely from the schmaltz or oil in the filling.
Stuffed Derma vs. Helzel
If you’ve come across the word “helzel” in Jewish cookbooks, it’s a close relative but not the same dish. Helzel uses poultry neck skin as the casing instead of intestine or foil. The filling is similar: flour or matzo meal, schmaltz, and fried onions, sometimes with semolina or bread crumbs. The neck skin is sewn shut with thread before cooking. Because of the resemblance, helzel is sometimes called “false kishke.” The main difference is the casing itself, which gives helzel a thinner, crispier skin and a slightly different texture than the dense, uniform log of stuffed derma.
Vegetarian and Vegan Versions
Because the traditional filling already contains no meat, making stuffed derma vegetarian is straightforward. Many family recipes have been meatless for generations. The key swap for a fully vegan version is replacing schmaltz with a neutral oil. Cooks who’ve made this switch note that olive oil doesn’t work as well here; a flavorless vegetable oil better mimics the richness of schmaltz without competing with the other flavors. The vegetables in the filling, particularly carrot, celery, and onion, do most of the heavy lifting for flavor in these versions.