Sausage Making
Meat Curing
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At some point in your culinary life, you realize that the sausages you buy at the market are usually over priced and not all that good. With a little time and a little equipment, you can easily make your own. You can also control the ingredients, but don't get carried away. Yes, some fat is needed to make a good sausage.
You need not stuff them into casings if you want to get started on a budget. Most of the time, our breakfast sausages are made into patties. Just fry them up and you will appreciate how good breakfast can be. Last time we made breakfast sausage, we divided the meat into one pound batches. Along with the regular Penzeys' seasoning I like we added other ingredients for variation. One had dried apples chopped in it, others were garlic, onion, and citrus.
Smoked sausages such as kielbasa should be stuffed though. Soon after you get started with this "hobby", that is the step you will want to take as your home made will be superior to any in the stores. I've recently ventured into cold smoking kielbasa. I was amazed at how good the results were on my first try. I use my standard propane Lazy-Q smoker but added a hotplate so I can generate smoke and not much heat. Once hung, it takes about four hours of smoking at a low temperature (90 to 100 degrees) then the meat is brought up to 155 degrees to cook. This is a common practice for many types of smoked sausage. The hotplate and hickory sawdust in a cake pan does a good job of generating smoke, but when the cooking time comes, the hotplate comes out and the regular burner is fired up. When cold smoking meat, a preservative must be used in the mix. In this case it is Prague Powder No. 1 (sodium nitrite) to prevent spoilage during the smoking time.
Getting ready to smoke kielbasa Ready to take it off the smoker
Another favorite is an Italian Wine and Cheese. The red wine is added along with the other ingredients and it is like no other Italian you ever had before. It is good is sauce along with the meatballs, alone with a pasta dish, or grilled.
Italian Cheese and Red Wine Sausage
You will enjoy this variation on the plain Italian pork sausage. The addition of cheese and wine raises this sausage to dinner table conversation.
Ingredients:
4 pounds boneless pork, shoulder or butt
1 tablespoon coarse ground fennel seed
2 bay leaves, crushed
3 tablespoons chopped parsley
5 garlic cloves, crushed
1/2 teaspoon dried red pepper flakes
3 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 cup grated Parmesan or Romano cheese
3/4 Cup dry red wine
4 yards sausage casings
Olive oil for cooking
Grind the meat using the coarse blade.
Mix all ingredients together and allow the mixture to sit for 1 hour before stuffing into casings.
To cook, place in a frying pan with a tiny bit of olive oil and just enough water to cover the bottom of the pan. Cover and cook until the water evaporates. Then, continue to brown, turning once.
Use where Italian sausages are called for.
Makes 4 pounds.
Source: The Frugal Gourmet Cooks with Wine
When we make breakfast sausage, we do variations of a similar style. One of my favorite is made by using a commercial seasoning, such as Penzeys Breakfast Seasoning. We grind five pounds of pork, add the seasoning and let stand. Then we divide the meat into one pound packages, but add other ingredients. In one, I'll chop up dried apples. I use the apple snitz from the Ames Company. Adds a nice touch. In another we may add extra garlic, another will have orange and lemon peel for a citrus touch. You get the idea, use your imagination.
I recently made pastrami for the first time. Now I have a problem. I will never be able to eat store bought pastrami again. This is GOOD stuff. You start by curing a beef brisket in a brine of water, sugar, salt, pickling spice, and Prague powder No. 1. After is is cured for three to four days at 38 degrees, it is ready to smoke. I took the meat out of the brine, rubbed it down with cracked pepper and coriander seed, then smoked it for hours. Slow smoked for 6 hours, it was then brought up to160 degrees to cook the meat. Refrigerated and then sliced the next day. You have to eat it to appreciate it. I've never had better flavor from a piece of pastrami. You can do it too!
Pork loins can be made into Canadian bacon. I cured it once for four days and it was OK but not what I wanted. A second time it was cured for 10 days and it is just wonderful.
If the pastrami was not smoked, it would be corned beef. My goal is to make my own bacon, but the way the pastrami went over, I may never get that far. Pastrami at every meal!
What do I need to get started?
Very little. A grinder or attachment
for a Kitchen Aid mixer, stuffing tubes, casings, meat.
A good scale that reads up to about five pounds is very handy, but not
required. After making a couple of batches, you will want to repeat so
measuring and weighing ingredients is a big help for accuracy.
For pork sausages, I'll buy boneless butts. They have about the right fat content to make the juicy, but not as fat as many commercial products. You can add other meats also. We don't care for dark meat turkey, but we take advantage of the sales on poultry. The dark meat is cut off and mixed with the pork. This makes a leaner sausage and has all the flavor of the pork and seasonings.
Keep the meat very cold during the entire process. It will grind better and give a better result. Grind, mix in seasonings, chill, stuff. If you are going to freeze them, consider investing in a Tilia Foodsaver Vacuum sealer. This allows for longer storage times and better quality. Freezer burn and ice crystals are eliminated. This is a money saver for all of your frozen meats.
While you may want to experiment on your own, you can also buy pre-mixed seasonings. These have the advantage of a professional blend of ingredients that help hold the moisture in the meat. The best ones have no salt added so you have complete control over the sodium content of the finished product. There is a good variety available from The Ingredient Store. I use them often.
A couple of sausage making tips
Keep the meat cold. If after cutting up a piece of meat to be ground it has warmed up a bit, put it in the freezer for 15 minutes to chill and firm up. It will grind much easier.
Keep a cup of crushed ice handy. If the grinder shows any signs of balking, toss in a little of the ice. It will clear out any fat that may be building up and cool the cutting blade. It also adds moisture to the sausage.
Have a helper when you do the stuffing. An extra set of hands sure makes the job easier the first couple of times.
Don't over stuff the casings. You need some space for when you twist the links. Twisting is a fun thing that takes practice. You pinch off the size link you desire, then, holding the casing on either side of the link, leave it slake, then twirl it around and it will twist the casing just right. Repeat every four inches or so.