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Sausage Recipe Secrets

Basically sausage is meat, salt and pepper. I will never forget when I made my first Polish smoked sausage that turned out very well and I proudly gave it to my friend - professional sausage maker Waldemar to try. I have included salt, pepper, garlic, and added optional marjoram. I also added nutmeg and other spices that I liked. Well my friend�s judgement was as follows:

�Great sausage but why all those perfumes?�

For him it was supposed to be the classical Polish Smoked Sausage and all it needed was salt, pepper and garlic.
Combining meat with salt and pepper already makes a great product providing that you will follow the basic rules of sausage making. It's that simple. Like roasting a chicken, it needs only salt, pepper, rotisserie, and it always comes out perfect. If you don�t cure your meats properly or screw up your smoking and cooking temperatures, all the spices in the world (saffron included) will not save your sausage.

The rules (the secrets):

1. Fat. The meat needs about 25 - 30% fat in it. The fat is the glue that holds meat particles together and gives sausages their texture. If you don�t like that rule, forget about making a good sausage, go out and buy a tofu hot dog!

2. Salt. You need salt. The proper amount of salt in meat (tastes pleasant) is 2 � 3 %, though 1.5 �2% is a usual average acceptable level. About 3.5-5% will be the upper limit of acceptability, anything more and the product will be too salty. Almost all original sausage recipes contain 2 % of salt and if you use that figure your sausages will be great. If you want to save on salt you can not make a decent sausage, buy a tofu hot dog instead!

Get the calculator and punch in some numbers. Or if you use the metric system you don�t even need the calculator: You need 2 grams of salt per 100 grams of meat. If you buy ten times more meat (1 kg) you will also need ten times more salt (20 grams). Now for the rest of your life you don�t have to worry about salt in your recipes.
If you want a consistent product weigh out your salt. Estimating salt per cups or spoons can be deceiving as not all salts weigh the same per unit volume.

3. Ingredients. Pepper is less crucial. If you don�t put enough you can always use a shaker, if you put too much get a beer or give it to your Mexican neighbor and he will love you for that. Normally it is about 5 - 10 % of the salt in the recipe.
You have already done the major part that�s needed to produce a good quality sausage. The rest is fine-tuning your creation.
Sugar. Less crucial, normally used to offset the harshness of salt. Amount used is about 10 % of the salt used in the recipe. Sugar is normally used with salt when curing meat.
Spices. Use freshly ground spices. Spices are very volatile and lose their aroma rapidly.

Most sausages will include a dominant spice plus other spices and ingredients. There are some Polish blood sausages (kaszanka) that add buckwheat grouts or rice, there are English blood sausages (black pudding) that include barley, flour or oatmeal. Some great Cajun sausages like Boudin also include rice, pork, liver and a lot of onion. Most sausages are made of solid meat which is easier and faster to process, but a lot of sausages like headcheese contain different organs like tongue, heads with brains, liver, skins, and hearts. Liver of course always goes into liverwurst. There are some delicious hams where the only ingredient is salt and people say that even adding pepper distorts the natural flavor.

Let's see what goes besides salt and pepper into some well known sausages that have a recognized flavor:

This is only a part of the article, to see it all go to: http://www.wedlinydomowe.com/sausage-recipe-secrets.htm

Yeah, those guys have a nice site, they really get into their smoking and preserving also. Take a look at some of their pictures when you're at the site, they're really amazing.

I think the salt is very subjective. I personally use 1% and it's just right for me.

Hi Seminole

Welcome to the forum, & thanks for the link

The rules (the secrets):

1. Fat. The meat needs about 25 - 30% fat in it. The fat is the glue that holds meat particles together and gives sausages their texture. If you don�t like that rule, forget about making a good sausage, go out and buy a tofu hot dog!

However fat does not hold the meat together unless you turn it into an emulsion, the main ingredient that holds it together is lean meat or rather the myosin in the lean meat. Fat is used as a flavour carrier, it is possible to make good sausage with fat as low as 5% by the use of fat replacers such as tapiocaline.

Hope this helps

Regards
Sausagemaker

aris wrote:I think the salt is very subjective. I personally use 1% and it's just right for me.

I agree. The assertion that there is a 'proper' proportion of salt is completely wrong. Tastes differ, and 1% suits me too.

Eric

Is tapiocaline just tapioca starch, or is it something special? I've had some requests for low-fat sausages.

Tapiocaline is one of the trade names but essentially it is made from tapioca starch, which should give similar results.

Regards
Sausagemaker

Aris, Roseway

We write in our article: "Most likely you will be making sausages for yourself so use spices that you and your kids like, after all you will end up eating it".

That applies to salt as well. When I make a sausage for myself I just add salt and pepper until I like it.

When I will make a well known sausage for someone else I will stick to the original recipe. I have managed to translate so far only about 30 original Polish sausage recipes that our butchers have been making for generations. There are some 300 recipes left... I have looked at the salt content and in almost all recipes it is about 2 %. It seems to me that 40 million sausage eating persons like it that way.

In part # 4 we also stress the point that the sausage should be tasted before it is stuffed. Which is important if you make it for yourself. When making 100 lbs of sausage I would forget whether I personally like it or not and I would follow the recipe.

Sausagemaker,

The aim of our web site is to make meat products and sausages the traditional way without any binders, fillers, fat replacers, soy protein concentrates, phosphates etc.

All our Polish sausage recipes come from 1958 Government archives and at that time we used only meat, salt, pepper, spices and nitrate for curing.
The era of those great meats and sausages is gone in Poland and elsewhere in Europe, Germany included.

We try to preserve the traditional art of making meats and we try to stay away from any kind of chemicals. If we were a meat processing plant we will have to use them to stay alive in the market, but we do it for ourselves so we try to make products of the highest possible quality.

I applaud your efforts & look forward to reading more & more, however it I stand by what I wrote it is the myosin that is the glue not the fat.
This is as true today as when sausage making began about 3000 years ago.
The reason meat sticks is when mixing the salt acts on the meat & extracts the protein this in turn holds the meat & fat pieces in place.

Regards
Sausagemaker

I don't add any salt at all to my "frying" sausage, the bangers I serve with mash, gravy and peas, as my wife is intollerant and the kids don't need it. I disagree with the need for salt to create texture, and have served kilometers of home-made bangers to friends and neibours.

Texture comes from good grinding and good mixing.

The main reason I love this site is that there is a wealth of advise for people who don't want the sh##e that you get in commercial meat products.

Wohoki

You have hit it right on the nail Good Grinding & Mixing, the salt helps speed up this process so if you do not use it you need to mix longer to get the same texture.

Regards
Sausagemaker

Well, salt does improve flavour too - that is its main purpose for my sausage.

You just don't need too much of it - that's all.

Although I have dabbled in making my own sausages and cooked meats in a quaint way for a number of years, I have never had the pleasure of working on a site such as this.

All of my stuffing had been done with a kenwood mixer and it wasn't very sucessful in the light of things today.

I have what I would say is the necessary equipment now, I have a Swedish Electrolux mixer called and KITCHEN ASSISTENT (note the spelling) that virtually does everything. I bought it orignally for breadmaking as it can handle 15lbs of dough at a time without burning out the powerful automatic load adjusting motor or gearbox........whereas I have been through about 15 Kenwoods chef gearboxes etc.....but there again it cost nearly �500.

It has a super mincer that handles quite a volume of meats besides other extruded commodities like spaghetti and macaroni products and cookies.

Which brings me to it's sausage making capabilities......it will take a good rolled handful of filling down the wide body of the mincer and operating the pusher the full length will produce a good length of filled casing to make two good bangers.....two twists and they are under control....another rolled handful stuffed down the neck with the pusher and you have another two ready for the twist.......so I can make a pound of sausages in a couple of minutes and everything is under control at all times......

Should I get a dreaded split then it is a simple matter to tie off and put the spilllage down the neck for the next sausage.......no panic with winding back the stuffer and having no where to put the spillage after tying off and starting again.

I can honestly say I am much happier with making sausages this way as I have complete control over the makings of them at my own speed and I have only one machine to clean afterwards.

Obviously this cannot handle large bore cooked meats.....so this is where the REBER will come in for stuffing ox bungs for the large cooked meats if and where I can find a site that shows me how to do them.

I also have a Magimix large food processor for emulsifying the meats into a paste....I wish someone could clarify this operation for me as I do not fully understand it......I try to make it so that when the filling meat is cooked it is of uniform smoothness with no bits or lumps except the added pork fat or peppercorns after emulsifying the meats. I never know how much water or stock to add.

Again I would like pointing in the right direction for these larger cooked meats like breakfast sausage or Bierwurst and peppered salami..etc.
something that the kids can take for their sandwich lunches.

I have no commercial aspirations or making stuff for any friends and relatives....just me and mine.


..My last comment is the amount of spices.......having tried Franco's mixes aspecially the Texas BBQ one.....I found that even the 20grms per kilo made the sausages too spicy for the kids and they complained of the amount of chilli in them and the first lot of 40 gms per kilo made me sweat like I was in a sauna.......

Anyone else find these rather strong. ??

Hi RvT

Re two of your points:

I use a Reber 5kg to do all my stuffing and find it brilliant. I can get the sausages out PDQ, especially lamb cased ones which when using a Kenwood type mixer I find takes ages - but there again I suppose it is what you are used to. And talking about what you are used to, I tend to use c30g per Kg of Francos mix. For me this is just right but on the game mix which again for me has far too much salt I tend to use 15g per Kg.

It would be intertesting to know the proportions of the mixes in the packets if that were possible?

Trial and error I suppose, but taste is subjective.

Cheers WW