Sausage formulas

Beginners FAQ on sausage making, meat curing etc may often be found at the head of each relevant section, but here is the place to ask experienced users for advice if you are still stuck or need more information...we're here to help!

Sausage formulas

Postby polka » Sun May 28, 2017 11:46 am

Hello All

I am having a bit of difficulty getting my mind around some of the formulas. I was trained as a chef, and baker a long time ago, and treating the whole sausage project as 100% seems odd.

I expected a formula to be something like:
meat = 100%
all other ingredients would be a % of the total meat weight.
true, the formula would never equal 100 in the end.

So when I see a formula that includes 5% salt -- I think 5% of the weight of the meat.
And that is not what the formula is saying.

So, when I read a formula, please tell me what am I seeing? What is the advantage of this style of formula? It has been confusing to me.

Thanks for your time and trouble to try and answer my query.

Rex W. Ulmer
aka "Polka"
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Re: Sausage formulas

Postby montanaSalami » Sun May 28, 2017 12:21 pm

FWIW, I treat formulas/Recipes as guides. When it comes to salt and dry-cured meats, more is better. The rest should be added following the guide and your own tastes.

When I first started I weighed everything. Now I just plunge the table or tea spoons in and like to see the added heaping.
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Re: Sausage formulas

Postby wheels » Sun May 28, 2017 12:22 pm

There is no advantage using % of total sausage - % of meat weight is far better - just like bakers' percentages are when making bread. You can then scale it for any amount of meat easily.

However members post in a manner that they understand and are comfortable with.

I would encourage people to weigh and post in gms - including liquids (traditionally weighed for accuracy when sausage making) as a percent of the total meat weight.

Spice mixes are often listed separately as a % of the whole spice mix and then added to the main recipe as a percentage of the meat block. This way the mix can be easily utilised for other projects.

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Re: Sausage formulas

Postby NCPaul » Sun May 28, 2017 6:43 pm

I try to do mine as a percent of meat and I have seen that recipes on this forum are made by others most often if they are expressed this way. I've tried to "fix" a couple of recipes that weren't expressed this way.
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Re: Sausage formulas

Postby RodinBangkok » Mon May 29, 2017 2:43 am

Agree with all the above, using the meat block as the base for calculating other ingredient percentages is the only way to go.
Here's a link to understanding bakers percentages, just think of the flour content as the meat block, it explains the math pretty clearly.

http://www.kingarthurflour.com/professi ... ntage.html

By standardizing this way you can get a good reading on the accuracy of formulations you come across, by looking at the percentages of cure, salt water, spice blends, etc, then setting some thresholds for yourself on what is generally acceptable percentages for each.
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Re: Sausage formulas

Postby polka » Mon May 29, 2017 2:21 pm

Many thanks to you fellas.

Now to just get my head wrapped around converting a formula that equals 100 to one where the meat is 100.
Either need more coffee this morning, or I need a good beer.
Brisket on the smoker for this evenings supper for American Memorial Day.

Take care
Cheers

Rex
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Re: Sausage formulas

Postby polka » Mon May 29, 2017 2:33 pm

Amazing what a nice strong cup of coffee can accomplish!

All meat and fat added together = 100%
Take the weight in grams of each other ingredient, and divide by weight of meat in grams = new percentage. Or at least, I think so........

R
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Re: Sausage formulas

Postby wheels » Mon May 29, 2017 8:40 pm

Post the recipe and someone'll help.

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Re: Sausage formulas

Postby vagreys » Tue May 30, 2017 10:16 pm

polka wrote:Hello All

I am having a bit of difficulty getting my mind around some of the formulas. I was trained as a chef, and baker a long time ago, and treating the whole sausage project as 100% seems odd.

I expected a formula to be something like:
meat = 100%
all other ingredients would be a % of the total meat weight.


As others have said, this is pretty much the standard approach to formulation. It isn't that a percentage of final product is odd, just less useful in some circumstances. % of FP requires more intermediate calculations in scaling a formula.

wheels wrote:There is no advantage using % of total sausage - % of meat weight is far better - just like bakers' percentages are when making bread. You can then scale it for any amount of meat easily...I would encourage people to weigh and post in gms - including liquids (traditionally weighed for accuracy when sausage making) as a percent of the total meat weight.


I developed a spreadsheet for analyzing old recipes and formulating new ones, and have it calculate both percentages of meat block and final product. If I have a customer who wants 20 lbs of sausage, having the spreadsheet scale by % of final product comes in handy. The base formulation is still % of meat block, though. And yes, once I switched over to metric weights from American weights and volume measures, I never looked back. SO much easier! For scaling liquids, especially to large quantities, liquid weight is the only way to go.

An easy way to convert formulas written as a % of final product is to multiply the percentages by 100 and call those grams (so 1% = .01, x100 = 1, so 1 gram), Take those weights for everything and recalculate the percentages as percentage of meat block, which you understand.
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Re: Sausage formulas

Postby petit couchon » Fri Jun 23, 2017 1:06 pm

polka wrote:Hello All

I am having a bit of difficulty getting my mind around some of the formulas. I was trained as a chef, and baker a long time ago, and treating the whole sausage project as 100% seems odd.

I expected a formula to be something like:
meat = 100%
all other ingredients would be a % of the total meat weight.
true, the formula would never equal 100 in the end.

So when I see a formula that includes 5% salt -- I think 5% of the weight of the meat.
And that is not what the formula is saying.

So, when I read a formula, please tell me what am I seeing? What is the advantage of this style of formula? It has been confusing to me.

Thanks for your time and trouble to try and answer my query.

Rex W. Ulmer
aka "Polka"


Hi Polka,
Feel free to try my batch calculator, simply input your required batch wieght in grams using the left hand blue squares.
The first is for basic sausage recipies, the second one just underneath allready has a Merguez sample recipie but if you look at the conversion table on the right hand side for herbs and spices you can simply adjust the figures to make the correct calculations so you can make vertualy any sausage you like.
It works for me, i'm not a purist just a near as damist, I have tried many combinations using my calculator and nobody has yet to complain that one flavour stands out more that the other, it is based on standard % of spice for any given wieght.
Hope you enjoy.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/l773tjxdotp5f ... .xlsx?dl=0
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