The main advantage of homemade sausage is its natural composition. In other words, you know how much meat and how much lard is in such a product, what spices were used, under what conditions the sausage was smoked and other nuances that no one will tell you about in the store. We will tell you in detail about how to prepare raw smoked sausage at home in our article. With our detailed descriptions, anyone can do this.
How to prepare minced meat for raw smoked sausage
To prepare raw smoked sausage, any type of meat can be used: pork, beef, lamb or a mixture of them in a certain percentage according to the recipe. To prepare minced meat, the meat is separated from cartilage, fat and tendons and cut into small pieces. If, for example, pork and beef are used, they are ground separately. There is no need to take meat that is too fatty, because during smoking the fat melts very much and voids are formed. The sausage itself becomes too fatty. For juiciness and taste, lard is added to the minced meat.
Cooking raw smoked sausage at home involves thoroughly salting the meat. It is recommended to use nitrite salt, which has an antioxidant effect on fats and increases the shelf life of the finished product. Nitrite salt allows you to achieve the complete destruction of botulism bacteria. Without this ingredient, it will be very difficult to obtain safe products at home.
Making sausages from liver
To prepare liver sausages, you can use any offal (lungs, liver, heart, kidneys, etc.). They are pre-cleaned and boiled, and then passed through a meat grinder. Also added to the liver are chopped onions and chicken eggs. After mixing the ingredients and obtaining a homogeneous mass, add sour cream, various seasonings and table salt.
The prepared sausage base is distributed over the cleaned intestines and tightly tied with thick cotton threads. The resulting products are boiled over low heat for half an hour or a little longer.
The finished sausages are removed from the broth and cooled. Later they are fried in a frying pan, on the grill or baked in the oven.
Casing for raw smoked sausage
When preparing homemade sausage, 2 types of casings are used: natural and artificial. They tolerate the smoking process equally well and do not burst, but they have significant differences.
Natural casings are pork, beef or lamb intestines or casings. They are sold already peeled, in a special salted brine or in vacuum packaging. Before use, just soak them for 7-10 minutes in cold water without salt, after which you can start stuffing them with minced meat.
It is very convenient to use a collagen casing when preparing sausages. It does not require soaking in water before use or special storage conditions. Unlike natural casings, which are stored in the refrigerator, collagen casings can last up to two years in a kitchen drawer.
The artificial polymer casing “Aitzel” is ideal for preparing raw smoked sausages. It is characterized by excellent smoke permeability, is microbiologically resistant to mold, is easy to clean and does not peel off during storage.
How to make raw smoked sausage at home
At home, the process of preparing raw smoked sausage occurs in the following sequence:
- Pork and beef (700 g each) are covered with salt (50 g) and sent to a shelf in the refrigerator, located immediately below or above the freezer, where the temperature is from 0 to +3 ° C. The meat should lie in salt for 5-7 days.
- Remove the meat from the salt and pass through a meat grinder with a 4 mm hole.
- Cut lard (600 g) into cubes measuring 3.5 mm.
- Add black pepper and garlic (2 cloves) to the minced meat. Additionally, it is recommended to add 6 g of sodium nitrite to the solution to preserve color and kill botulism bacteria.
- After stuffing the minced meat into the casing, the resulting sausage loaves are pierced in several places with a needle and hung in a cold room (0-3 °C) for 7 days to settle.
- The sausage is cold smoked (at a temperature not exceeding 20 °C) for two days.
- Raw smoked sausage at home is dried for a month in a room with good ventilation and an air temperature not higher than 10 ° C. In such conditions, the finished sausage can be stored for 4 months.
Here is the recipe for dry-cured sausage:
Our love for sausage is ineradicable. She is our everything. Spring and autumn are the perfect time to make your own sausage. It is at this time of year that we have a fairly stable moderately cool temperature, and this is almost the only difficulty for homemade sausage making. After all, the longest and most important stage in sausage-making is the drying of the sausage; it lasts 6-8 weeks and should take place at +15 degrees C in a well-ventilated area. A glassed-in balcony or an unheated cottage without mice is the only thing that comes to mind for this task. Below or above t or poor ventilation will lead to either obvious spoilage of the product or uneven drying, i.e. reduction in quality. There are many recipes for dry-cured or raw smoked sausages based on beef, horse, pork and (probably) lamb meat. I decided to make my first test using duck breasts and beef. Everything written below is based on what I read in the book “Good Kitchen. Canning."
So. Stage one - preparing the meat.
I cut the beef (850 g) coarsely (the size of half a fist), layered the lard (500 g) into slices ~1.5 cm thick, left the duck breasts (1300 g) as is, generously sprinkled with coarse sea salt, and put them in the refrigerator for a day. The next day, I wiped off any excess moisture and remaining salt from the lard, and dried the meat with paper towels - each piece separately. Cleaned the beef from veins and films. I weighed it - 750 g of beef remained, duck - 1000 g. Thus, the meat-fat ratio, which should be approximately 2:1 or 3:1 (otherwise the sausage will be dry), is quite satisfied, taking into account the fact that there is quite a lot on the breasts lard
Stage two - make minced meat.
I turned the beef and a little lard through a meat grinder with a fine grid, cut the rest of the lard into 1 cm cubes, and cut the breasts into about 2 cm cubes.
I poured in about 50 ml of cognac, in which I dissolved 2-3 tbsp. l. honey, and added about 70 g of coarse salt (it should be about 3.5% of the weight of the product). Mix without diligence - otherwise the minced meat will become greasy. Divided the minced meat into three parts of equal weight. To one I added a Chinese mixture of five spices (wuxiangmian) and a little freshly ground black pepper, to another pink pepper crushed in a mortar and the same black pepper, to the third - a noticeable amount of black and green pepper, which were roughly crushed in a mortar, a couple of allspice peas crushed finely with a piece of nutmeg and a few cardamom seeds. I mixed the minced meat and spices (which amounted to about 0.5-1 tsp per serving of minced meat). According to the books, saltpeter is added to minced meat to preserve the pink color of the meat. After my experiment with drying duck breast, I decided not to add any saltpeter - firstly, I don’t have the required quality (analytical grade), and secondly, the color of the dried breast suited me quite well.
Stage three - stuffing.
We remove the mesh from the meat grinder, insert a tube for stuffing sausages instead, and put washed and pre-processed pork (or whatever) casings (intestines) on the tube, checked for the absence of holes. We tie the intestine with a double knot and stuff the sausage very tightly - the air inside will contribute to spoilage.
We tie the sausages, making them the required length - mine turned out to be from 15 to 35 cm long. It is better to separate the sausages, after tying them with twine, from each other, and not leave them as a garland, this way it is more convenient to work with them further.
Stage four - withering.
We tie the sausage with twine, simultaneously piercing the sausage with a thin needle (stitching) and releasing air if bubbles with it are still discovered during the tying process. There is no need to tie pork or lamb intestines sausages as often as I did, just tie them lengthwise and crosswise a couple of times - this will help them keep their shape.
We hang the sausage in a cool, well-ventilated room at +15 degrees C. It is recommended to turn thick sausages from time to time to avoid the minced meat “flowing down” and becoming pear-shaped. The room should be dark (unfortunately, this cannot be done on the balcony, but it’s worth at least covering the sausage from bright light with thick paper). You should not hang sausage in sunlight, especially direct sunlight. It is ideal to hang it in the dark, in a summer house that is empty during the off-season, in a place inaccessible to mice.
This is what the sausage looks like 18 days after the start of withering. She has noticeably lost weight, the ropes dangle freely on her, and she has become noticeably harder to the touch. According to the book, it may become covered with white, harmless mold - this is a sign that the process is going correctly.
Continuation.
Next time I made the sausage a little differently. I gave up pork, gave up most of the duck fat in favor of pork - unfortunately, duck fat begins to age over time and this clearly affects the taste (it lasts 2-3 months). The final composition of lard was 1/3 duck, 2/3 pork, meat - 2/3 duck and 1/3 beef. Practice has shown that cardamom and traditional Chinese “duck” spices - star anise, Sichuan pepper, cloves - are very suitable spices. This year, apparently due to more favorable conditions than before, the sausage, as expected, was covered with a thick layer of white dry mold, which gives the characteristic aroma of salami and a special taste. I took the sample for Christmas - a great gift for myself! And note - what color, and not a gram of saltpeter.
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Brunswick smoked sausage recipe
The famous Brunswick sausage is prepared in a similar way by cold smoking loaves filled with minced meat. After salting, the meat is ground in a meat grinder immediately along with the bacon. The result is a tasty and uniformly textured raw smoked sausage at home.
The recipe for preparing such a product involves using the following ingredients: 900 g of beef, 500 g of lean pork, 600 g of bacon, 70 g of salt, 4 g of sugar, 2 g of black or white ground pepper, cardamom on the tip of a knife. This quantity of products produces 2 kg of high-quality minced meat. Shrinkage of the finished product is at least 30% of the original weight.
Making delicious chocolate sausage for dessert
Few people know, but sausages can be not only meat, but also sweet. This product will serve as an excellent dessert, which is sure to please both adults and small children.
So, to prepare homemade chocolate sweets we will need:
- cocoa powder 2 large spoons;
- fresh butter approximately 200 g;
- whole milk about 1/2 cup;
- peeled walnuts approximately 100 g;
- shortbread cookies about 500 g;
- light sugar 1 full glass.
Homemade raw smoked beef sausage
The taste of homemade raw smoked sausage is no worse than store-bought sausage, but its composition is natural, without monosodium glutamate and other dangerous additives. You control the entire cooking process yourself, from purchasing raw materials to drying after smoking.
Raw smoked beef sausage at home is made according to this recipe:
- 1.5 kg of beef brisket and ham are cut into small cubes using a knife.
- 75 g of nitrite salt, 20 g of spices and 1.5 g of starting cultures are added to the minced meat. The amount of ingredients is indicated per 3 kg of meat. Starter cultures are necessarily added to minced meat, since they prevent the spoilage of raw materials, suppressing pathogenic and putrefactive bacteria, and help accelerate the production of lactic acid.
- The minced meat is thoroughly mixed and compacted very tightly into the casing using a sausage syringe or a meat grinder with a special attachment.
- To get the starter cultures to work, the sausage loaves are placed in a plastic bag and left for 48 hours at room temperature, and then placed in the refrigerator for another day.
- Next, cold smoking is carried out: 2 times for 4 hours and 3 times for 2 hours for 14 days at equal intervals.
If the sausage has not dried during this time, it is recommended to hang the raw smoked loaves in a ventilated area for another 14-30 days.
Homemade dry-cured sausage
The process of preparing dry-cured sausage differs slightly from raw smoked sausage. Unless the process of smoking products is omitted.
Otherwise, dry-cured and raw smoked sausages at home are prepared in almost the same way:
- Fermentation and salting of meat occurs in the refrigerator at a temperature of +3 °C. For 1 kg of meat, take 20 g of salt, preferably nitrite.
- After 5 days, the meat is chopped with a knife or in a meat grinder, diced lard, a teaspoon of sugar (for 3 kg of pork), pepper to taste and a tablespoon of cognac are added to the minced meat. The prepared minced meat is stuffed into a casing pre-soaked in water.
- The prepared sausages should rest under pressure in the refrigerator (+3 °C) for a week, which will give the necessary shrinkage. After this, the products are hung in a ventilated room at a temperature of +10 ° C for another month.
According to reviews, recipes for curing and smoking sausage at home are simple and allow you to prepare a truly tasty and healthy product with a natural composition.