Embrace the Sausage
Comments (3) Embrace the sausage. This is what Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn say in their curing, salting, smoking, and sausage-making bible, Charcuterie.
A few months ago we hosted a sausage-making workshop organized by SENNAR, an education program sponsored by the Brazilian government. Everyone participated—me, James, my sister Tatiana, all of our employees, and Oscar. (He’s a chef in a dog’s body.) Before moving to the farm, James and I also took a great sausage-making class at Chicago’s Kendall College.
Unruly class member
Class disciplinarian
All you need to make sausage at home is an electric mixer with a meat grinder attachment (most Kitchen-Aid’s have this), some hog casings, and tool to stuff or encase the sausage. Actually, you don’t even have to encase the sausage; you can simply mold the ground sausage meat into patties or fry it in a pan to add to pizza and pastas.
Hog casings are pig’s intestines that have been washed and treated. The membrane encasing sausage meat is intestine, or a synthetic collagen made to resemble intestine. You can buy real or synthetic casings at The Sausage Maker, an amazing online store for all of your sausage needs. (My former catalog of choice used to be Anthropologie. Now I spend my free time drooling over curing salts and sausage prickers.)
Back to casings—we get ours from our pigs, which we kill and butcher on our property. First, we wash the intestines thoroughly with water, then turn them inside out with a bamboo rod and wash them again. After about seven to ten washes, we soak the intestines in water and limejuice. Why all of this fastidious washing? Because the intestines run from the stomach to the anus and are filled with digested materials on their way out of our bodies. (In other words, intestines are filled with poop.)
Then we take a small plastic spatula with rounded edges and scrape the cleaned intestines. We learned this scraping technique at our SENNAR workshop. It’s miraculous! Basically, the plastic spatula scrapes away the intestines’ lining, making them translucent and as thin as rubber bands. After scraping, we wash them again, inside and out. Now they are ready to use for sausage. I am amazed by how fine and light yet incredibly strong casings are. Their strength allows casings to hold in all of a sausage’s delicious fattiness, and gives the eater that amazing snap when biting into a sausage.
In homage to our workshop, here’s a great recipe for fresh Italian sausage. What is a “fresh” sausage? It’s one that is cooked and eaten hot. It is not cured or smoked, and has no curing salts in its ingredients.
Fresh Italian sausage
4 lbs lean pork butt, cubed. (The butt is not the pig’s rear end but its shoulder. The shoulder has lots of nice marbling, which is great for sausage.)
1 lb pork fat, cubed
5 tsp coarse Kosher salt
5 tsp fresh black pepper coarsely ground
2 cloves garlic, finely minced
2.5 tsp fennel seed (Yum. This adds such dimension to the sausage)
1 tsp anise seed
Crushed red pepper flakes to taste
Medium hog casings, if making links.
First, it is imperative to KEEP YOUR MEAT COLD during the entire sausage-making process. Sausage that gets too warm will “break,” meaning the fat and protein will separate from each other when cooked, and you’ll get a mealy or crumbly texture to your cooked sausage. You want a smooth but firm texture. You want your sausage to glide not crumble! So I recommend cutting up the cubes of meat and fat, freezing it, then defrosting it just a little bit. You can put it through your grinder nearly frozen, and it comes out much better than at room temperature.
First, mix the spices together in a bowl. In your meat grinder, grind the chunks of nearly frozen meat and fat together using a coarse grinding disk.
Use your mixer (with either the palette or bread kneading attachment—not the whisk) to mix the ground meat and the spices. Ideally, this mixture should become a sticky ball, where the fats, meat, and seasonings make a “primary bind” as the charcuterie boys call it. The more you knead your meat mixture, the more the meat’s protein (called myosin) develops, and the stickier it becomes.
OK, so you have your perfect sticky ball of meat. Take a little, golf ball sized round, make a patty, and fry it on the stove. Eat it. Enjoy it. Have some wine. This is your taste test, to make sure your seasoning is on point. Before you stuff a sausage, it’s best to test it. This way, you can add more seasoning (or more meat if it’s too salty) before you go through the trouble of stuffing.
Stuffing:
The same mixer you used to grind the meat also comes with a plastic stuffer attachment. Wet your casings, slide them on to the nozzle, then turn on your machine and stuff. When your casings are filled, twist them or tie them into links. Then prick these links with a needle, knife tip, or sausage pricker to get out air pockets.
Listen, I’m not going to lie: stuffing is hard. The casings are slippery. The meat squirts out in uneven clumps. It takes practice. My first links alternated between fat little maki rolls and weirdly pencil-like things. Oh, well. They all tasted good.
Refrigerate your fresh sausage and use it within 3 days. Or, as our Kendall College teacher said, immediately if you are using store-ground meat. (It is not as sanitary as grinding your own.) Or you can wrap sausages individually and freeze.
Here’s an inspirational little quote, to get you excited about your sticky balls:
“Sausage involves craftsmanship in the kitchen, care from the cook, and devotion from the eater. There may be no finer package of protein, fat, and seasonings than that which resides within the transparent but resilient hog casing—and none more humble.”
–Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn.
Themocracy