Home Sausage Making: How-To Techniques for Making and Enjoying 100 Sausages at Home

338 Pages·2003·3.25 MB·English

by  Susan Mahnke Peery

HOME SAUSAGE MAKING
How-to Techniques for Making and Enjoying
100 Sausages at Home
Susan Mahnke Peery & Charles G. Reavis
The mission of Storey Publishing is to serve our customers by
publishing practical information that encourages
personal independence in harmony with the environment.
Edited by Dianne M. Cutillo
Art direction by Cynthia N. McFarland
Cover design by Carole Goodman, Blue Anchor Design
Illustrations by Elayne Sears
Text design by Carole Goodman, Blue Anchor Design,
Cynthia N. McFarland, and Susan Bernier
Text production by Jennifer Jepson Smith
Indexed by Susan Olason/Indexes & Knowledge Maps © 1981, 1987, 2003 by
Storey Publishing, LLC
Home Sausage Making was first published in 1981 and was revised in 1987.
All of the information in the previous editions has been revised and updated.
This edition includes new text and 68 new recipes.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written
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passages or reproduce illustrations in a review with appropriate credits; nor may
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in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or other — without written permission from the publisher.
The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our
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Printed in the United States by Malloy
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Peery, Susan Mahnke.
Home sausage making : how-to techniques for making and enjoying
100
sausages at home/Susan Mahnke Peery and Charles G. Reavis.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-58017-471-8 (alk. paper)
1. Cookery (Sausages) 2. Sausages. I. Reavis, Charles, 1948– II.
Title.
TX749.5.S28 P44 2002
641.3’6′dc21
2002015780
Contents
Preface
Part One: The Techniques
1. The Story of Sausage
2. Equipment and Ingredients
3. Making and Cooking Sausages: The Essential Techniques
Part Two: The Sausages
4. Pork Sausages
5. Beef, Lamb, and Veal Sausages
6. Combination Sausages
7. Game Sausages
8. Poultry Sausages
9. Seafood Sausages
10. Vegetarian Sausages
Part Three: Cooking with Sausage
11. Sausage for Breakfast or Brunch
12. Sausage Starters
13. Sausage for Lunch or Dinner
Appendixes
Metric Equivalents and Conversion
Resources
Acknowledgments
Index
PREFACE
Like the first person to eat an oyster, history’s first sausage maker is
anonymous. But we owe this person a great debt, for sausage is up there with
wine and cheese and bread as one of the world’s great foods. Sausage is more
than just a way of preserving meat and using up the scraps. Sausage has been
made for centuries in nearly every culture and country around the world, with
great variation and ingenuity in taking advantage of local conditions and
ingredients.
If you have never made sausage before, this book will walk you through the
steps to successful sausage. Your neighbors, friends, and relatives will not only
be impressed — they will “happen” to show up for supper with amazing
frequency! With minimal equipment, anyone can make a simple fresh sausage:
It’s like meatloaf stuffed into a casing.
For the more experienced sausage maker, we offer recipes for more than
100 different sausages, from fresh pork sausage to Old World cured and smoked
specialties. Game sausage from venison and rabbit to bear and boar will please
the hunters among us. (Come to think of it, no doubt that first sausage maker
was a hunter faced with hundreds of pounds of woolly mammoth, yards of
intestines, and the prospect of a long winter.) If you are a vegetarian or prefer
poultry or seafood, we offer more than three dozen recipes for making these new
and delicious sausages.
Once you get the hang of sausage making, your own ingenuity will lead you
even farther along this culinary path. We hope that you will utilize the response
card bound into this book and let us know about your own adventures in sausage
making.
Part One
The Techniques
CHAPTER 1
The Story of Sausage
Everything has an end except a sausage,
which has two.
— Danish proverb
SAUSAGE WAS BORN OF NECESSITY, a way of preserving meat in
times of plenty to eat when life turned lean. The fact that it tasted good, made
efficient use of a slaughtered animal, and could be seasoned and shaped
according to the sausage maker’s taste meant sausage was a real keeper in the
larder, right next to cheese, wine, beer, dried lentils, raisins, and other staples.
When you make your own sausage, fresh or cured, you are in good
company. Homer mentioned the Greeks’ love for grilled sausage in the Odyssey.
The legionnaires of Imperial Rome wouldn’t march without their little bottles of
garum (a fermented fish sauce similar to today’s nam pla from Thailand) and
long strings of dried or smoked sausages.
Sausage making really took off in Europe during the medieval period, when
an energetic spice trade and returning Crusaders brought exotic seasonings and
new cooking techniques to sleepy farms and villages. Medieval towns all across
Europe — Bologna, Frankfurt, Vienna, and many others — gave their names to
distinctive sausages we still love. In North America, Native Americans dried and
smoked venison and buffalo meat to make jerky, and they stuffed meat, suet, and
berries into skins to make pemmican.
Sausage, part of the original portable feast, still delights our palates. It is a
sturdy, nourishing comfort food, a “link” to the past. And when we make our
own sausage, choosing ingredients and styles that please ourselves, our families,
and our friends, the possibilities are, well, endless.
SAUSAGE BASICS
There are literally thousands of varieties of sausage in the world, but the
United States Department of Agriculture groups them all into two types:
uncooked, including fresh bulk sausage, patties, links, and some smoked
sausages; and ready-to-eat, including dry, semidry, and/or cooked sausages.
Fresh sausages must be cooked before they are eaten. Like other fresh meat,
they are highly perishable and must be refrigerated or frozen until you are ready
to cook them. Ready-to-eat sausages are cooked and/or preserved with
ingredients such as salt, nitrites (now closely regulated), and alcohol, and they
may be dried and/or smoked to further prevent spoilage. These sausages can be
eaten out of hand (a slice of pepperoni, for instance), or cooked just enough to
heat through (a frankfurter, for example).
By our definition, sausage is a mixture of ground meat and (usually) fat,
poultry, seafood, or vegetarian ingredients laced with salt, herbs, and spices. A
sausage mixture can be shaped into a patty and fried like a burger or it can be
stuffed into a casing. Once stuffed and twisted into links, it may be cooked on
the spot or dried, smoked, fermented, or otherwise preserved.
Stuffing may seem like a lot of extra work, especially for fresh sausage, but
it is worth it. Beyond giving the sausage its characteristic shape, the casing helps
to improve the texture of the finished product and meld the flavors. That
sublimely satisfying moment of biting into a hot, juicy homemade sausage
doesn’t happen when you shape the mixture into patties instead.
It would be futile to try to catalog all of the varieties of sausage in the
world, since some kinds are made only in a small region or even in a single
household. As you learn to make your own sausages, you will begin to
personalize your recipes, perhaps creating your own unique variety, and certainly
adding to the dazzling array of sausages that have already been thought up in the
human mind to please the human palate.
Homemade sausages are popular among hunters, who like to make good
use of the wild game they bring home. People who raise livestock turn to
sausage making as a delicious way to make economical use of their animals at
slaughtering time. But as our recipes will demonstrate, you can live in a tiny city
apartment and shop in a supermarket, and still make your own delicious and
distinctive sausage. Sausage making is for everyone.
Varieties of Sausages
Some of the many varieties of sausages that we will make are described
below. Included in the description is an indication of whether the sausage is
usually a fresh one or falls into the ready-to-eat category. The cooked, dried,
fermented, and smoked sausages are always stuffed into casings for ease of
handling and processing.
Bavarian summer sausage is a German-style salami mildly flavored with
mustard seed and sugar. Whenever I have some, I think of Bavarian beer fests
and rye bread. It’s a dried sausage.
Bockwurst, a German-style sausage made from veal or veal and pork, is
usually flavored with onions, parsley, and cloves and is prepared fresh or
partially cooked, then refrigerated and completely cooked before eating.
Bratwurst is a German-style sausage made from pork and veal. It looks
like a fat hot dog and is delicately seasoned with allspice, caraway, and
marjoram.
SAUSAGE CATEGORIES
In the inimitable words of the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS)
of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), “Sausages are
either ready to eat or not.”
Classifying sausages into categories is difficult because sausages are
produced by so many different methods. Following is a simple
classification of various types and how they should be stored and cooked.
Fresh sausages are made from uncooked meats and other ingredients.
They must be kept refrigerated, then cooked before serving and may be
frozen for 2 to 3 months. Examples include fresh pork and Italian sausages.
Cooked sausages are fully cooked, as by poaching or smoking, during
processing and may be eaten without heating, but most are heated again
before serving. These should be stored in the refrigerator, as well.
Frankfurters and bologna are examples.
Other ready-to-eat sausages, also called preserved or cured sausages,
are treated with salt and other additives to impart different flavors and
extend storage time. Some sausages, including pepperoni, are cured, or
preserved, by drying, and some are smoked as well during processing.
These sausages need no further cooking and keep indefinitely in the
refrigerator.