by This Little Piggy » Tue Nov 13, 2012 6:51 pm
All the comments here seem to me to be on the right track.
SALT. While we are still regularly told to reduce salt in our diet as a way to treat hypertension, medical studies show little to no benefit. For a very small portion of the population, a very low sodium diet may reduce their blood pressure a few points. That's it. And, as mentioned above, salt in the mix is essential to extract myosin from the meat and get a good bind. If you really want or need low sodium levels, try substituting some sodium phosphates. Just 2g per pound of meat will give you a good bind. Also be sure to mix the salts with the ground meat for a day or two before final mixing and stuffing, to give them plenty of time to work.
FAT. As mentioned above, if you're just using whole shoulder, there may not be enough fat in the mix. Typically, you want a ratio of 4:1 or 3:1 meat to fat. If you're cutting back on the fat for health reasons, please reconsider. I know that for as long as I've been alive, we've been told that eating saturated animal fats causes heart disease, but the latest meta-analysis (2010) of scientific studies found no significant link between saturated fat consumption and cardiovascular disease. And animal fats have almost as high a proportion of oleic acid (the "heart health" good stuff) as olive oil
COOKING. Finally, don't overcook the poor sausage! We're told that ground meat has to be cooked to 160ºF in order to be safe to eat, but at temperatures that high, the proteins in meat constrict tightly, squeezing out the moisture and leaving the sausage dry. The truth is that pathogen reduction is a function of BOTH time and temperature and that you can pasteurize a sausage just as effectively by heating it to 130ºF and holding it there for just over an hour. That's what I do, in a temperature-controlled water bath, and the finished, fully cooked sausage is so deliciously moist you'll never go back to cooking them any other way!
Hope all this helps!
"Nothing exceeds like excess."
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