11.10 Sausages and casings

What sausage is

The word sausage comes from the Latin salsus, meaning salted. Sausage making goes back at least to the early Greeks and Romans. Sausage began as a way to keep meat and carry it; people learned that salt preserves meat, and that dried meat could be mixed with dried berries and spices. Stuffing meat into casings is still done much the same way, but recipes have grown far more refined.

A sausage has six basic parts:

• The main ingredient, usually a tough cut from the leg or shoulder.
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• Fat, most often pork fat, sometimes heavy cream. Fat is essential: it gives moisture, flavor and a feeling of fullness.
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• Seasonings and cures: sugars, salts and curing agents. They help prevent food-borne illness and add flavor, and in hot smoking the sugar helps the sausage brown.
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• Spices, toasted or not, whole or ground. Italian sausage, sweet or hot, usually has whole fennel seed; merguez, from North Africa, uses Tunisian spices.
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• Herbs, fresh or dried.
• Aromatics: wine, spirits, citrus zest, bottled sauces like hot pepper sauce or Worcestershire, and vegetables, which are often cooked first. Cajun boudin is a sausage of rice and pork, mostly liver, with celery, onion and bell pepper.
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The casing is not one of the basic parts, because many sausages are made as patties or sold loose, in bulk. Herbs and garlic can carry microbes from the soil, so cooks often cook them before adding them to raw meat, especially for a sausage that will be cured without cooking.

The French spice mix quatre épices goes into everything from pâté to duck confit. One recipe mixes ground spices in these proportions:

• 2 parts black pepper;
• 1½ parts nutmeg;
• 1 part cinnamon;
• 1 part cloves.

Fresh, cured and smoked

There are two main kinds of sausage, fresh and cured. A cured sausage may be cooked or dried. Smoking is common for cured sausages but not required. Curing changes the meat and its taste, as a ham tastes different from a roast of pork. Every smoked sausage is cured, because of botulism. The germ behind it, Clostridium botulinum, is everywhere, grows without air in the middle of a sausage, and thrives at 4°C to 60°C (39°F to 140°F), the warmth of a smokehouse and of storage afterwards. The range 4°C to 60°C (40°F to 140°F) is the danger zone, where most harmful bacteria grow.

Grinding

Get the equipment ready first.

• Safety. Unplug the grinder. Make sure every part is there, in good order, clean, sanitized and free of rust, so no rust or old protein gets into the meat.
• Cold. Chill the housing, worm (auger), blade, die plates and collar in an ice bath. Cold parts keep the fat from melting, which gives a good emulsion. Skip this and the sausage turns mealy and crumbly, ends up dry, and bursts on the grill.
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• Care. Do not cut the meat too big for the feed tube, and do not force it down too fast.
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To put the grinder together:

• Put the worm into the mounted housing.
• Fit the blade over the end of the worm with its flat side facing out, toward you.
• Add the die, the plate with holes, lined up by its notch.
• Screw the collar on snugly, and only then plug the machine in.
• Chill the meat and fat as close to freezing as you can, 30°F to 32°F, and cut them into 1- to 2-inch pieces that slip easily into the tube.
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• Grind. The meat should come out looking like ground beef. If it is torn, or the fat comes out pasty and smooth, the blade may be on backwards. Stop, unplug, and take the grinder apart to find the fault.
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• Mix the ground meat in a chilled mixer on medium speed for about a minute to spread the seasoning and fat evenly. Do not overfill the bowl.
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• Cook a small piece and taste it before filling any casings. Cook it the way the finished sausage will be cooked: poach a sausage meant for poaching, grill one meant for the grill.
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Some recipes mix the cures and seasonings into the diced meat and fat and let it rest before grinding. Others grind the meat and fat separately and season afterwards. Follow the recipe. Tasting and seasoning are covered earlier. see chapter 6: When to add them

Fermented sausages

Dry and semi-dry sausages are an old craft back in demand for charcuterie boards. During their long cure, lactic acid forms and gives them a tangy taste. Summer sausage and Lebanon bologna are semi-dry; saucisson sec, a dry pork and garlic sausage cured in hog middles, is dry.

• Use salt and curing agents (nitrates and nitrites) with sugars such as sucrose and dextrose, at roughly 65 percent meat to fat. The salts keep harmful bacteria away, and the sugars help the cure and feed the helpful bacteria.
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• Mix the meat well with the salts and sugars and hold it for a few days as close to freezing as possible, then add the other seasonings and grind.
• Stuff carefully so no air pockets are left, where bacteria could grow. Keep the drying room at about 60 percent humidity, so the inside dries and no green mold grows on the casings.
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• Semi-dry sausages lose about 15 percent of their weight as they dry, and dry sausages up to 30 percent. A white mold on the outside is harmless and welcome.
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Emulsion sausages

Frankfurters, bologna and mortadella are emulsion sausages: the meat is chopped to a smooth paste. They follow a 5-4-3 ratio. Five parts are trimmed raw meat, four parts pork fat taken from the jowl, the belly or the plate, and three parts water, added as ice and chopped in with a buffalo chopper, which keeps the mixture very cold.

• Trim, cure and grind the meat, finishing with a very fine grind and keeping it cold all the time.
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• Grind the chilled fat and keep it cold.
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• Process the cold meat with the ice in stages in the chopper, so an emulsion forms, aiming for 30°F.
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• Let it warm to 40°F, add the ground fat, and process until rich, smooth and fluffy.
• Add the rest of the seasonings, and powdered milk if used, and process until the mixture reaches 58°F. It is now in the danger zone, so test and adjust the seasoning quickly, then case, pack and refrigerate it.

Casings

Casings are natural or synthetic. Natural casings are the intestines of sheep, hogs and cattle. Wash them in water with vinegar. Synthetic casings are made of cotton, cellulose, or collagen taken from beef hide. Some of them cannot be eaten, so take those off before the sausage reaches the guest.

Hog casings come threaded on rings and packed in salt, which holds back bacteria. Beef casings are shipped in salt in plastic buckets. Wash either kind before use, and thread it onto a stuffing tube; beef casings need the largest tube.

Filling the casings

• Flush the casings with running water, then leave them to soak in acidulated water. With the tap running slowly, open one end and thread it over the wet tube, feeding the whole casing onto it, and keep the tube moist.
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• Fill the stuffer with sausage meat and push out the air. Once meat appears at the tip of the tube, draw a little casing forward and knot it.
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• Fill the casing without too much pressure, or it may burst. Make one long sausage coiled around itself; twist it into links later.
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• Go back over the sausage and prick out any air bubbles with a needle or the tip of a knife.
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