On Making Sausage

Today I made sausage for only the second time ever. The first time was at the tail end of the Dubrulle "serious amateur" 6-day advanced culinary class.

My cousins Anita and Karlheinz from Germany are visiting my parents and so I took the adorable granddaughter to be doted upon and took up Karlheinz's offer of showing me how to make classic German bratwursts (his rendition of them naturally). He'd made a batch before our trip out there last weekend, and they're really awesomely good.

I brought along my KitchenAid stand mixer as it has a stronger motor than my dad's, and after lunch, we set to work.

First is the meat (all pork) - the ratio is 8 parts shoulder to 2 parts belly. If you want slightly moister sausages you can go 7 to 3. You want the meat ground coarsely - I learned that commercial ground meat is actually twice ground, but as a general rule for sausage you just want it run through once.

Then after mixing the secret seasoning recipe (secret = I'm not going to post it) you sprinkle it over the ground meat (we had 6.5kg of it), you knead it. Like bread dough. Aggressive, hard, making sure you mix in all the seasonings well and thoroughly. And you know what - if you want to see how the taste is, to make sure the seasoning is right, you taste it. Raw.

Now, I'm sure lots of people will freak out - but that's because we've been conditioned to avoid raw meat, especially chicken, as if it were radioactive waste. But let me tell you something - it was GOOD. So good in fact, that last week I spread some of the "we ran out of casing" sausage meat straight onto bread. Mmm mmm mmm. It's really no different in any fundamental way from steak tartare.

Once the meat has been worked, it becomes quite firm, very much like bread dough when it's ready. The proteins in meat have the same reaction to the kneading as the glutens in flour.

We let the meat mixture sit for about an hour to let the flavours infuse (that, and we went and had lunch). After lunch, we went down and set up the KitchenAid with all the attachments and got to work.

Slipping sausage casing onto the end of the nozzle where the meat comes out suggests and looks exactly like what you think it might, and no doubt contributes to the notion that those who love the law and sausages should watch neither being made.

Once the casing was ready, you need two people - one to feed the meat into the machine, one to deal with the extrusion of meat into the casing. To process 6.5kg of prepared meat took us about 40-45 minutes. I joked at the start that I would probably get the hang of it about the time we were almost done, and I was right.

It was interesting to me that we did the links only after the casing (about 2m long) was filled. At Dubrulle we made the links as we went along (using artifical collagen casing), but Karlheinz did it after the fact and showed me the easy technique to do it - at least it looked easy, kinda like how an old Italian grandmother makes fresh pasta look easy.

After the sausages were in links, they were hung to dry. The sausages "settle" into the casing, and also change colour. The sausage recipe we made is very flexible. You can cook them as bratwursts of course, but you could also let them dry out in a cool room and in about eight days they'll go from fresh to coated in white (salt) to turning red (cured). You can also cold smoke them (aka Mettwurst) and then cook them or spread it raw on toast (sprinkled with a little bit of onion, mmmm...).

The local JN&Z deli said any time I want sausage casing I can just book ahead, and that if I like they'll make me 50lbs of sausage to whatever recipe I like. I might just take them up on that, especially as I'm not getting a side of pork this fall.