August 1978
Dining In
The Missing Link
The only way to know what’s in your sausage is to make it yourself.
If you’ve let sausage go out of your life because of anxiety about commercially packaged meats, then consider making it in your own kitchen. Using your own herbs and spices and fresh ingredients will renew your appetite for this most ancient and universal of processed foods. References to sausage date back to Homer, and all meat-eating cultures since then have savored some form of it. Today we enjoy bratwurst from Germany, bologna and salami from Italy, cervelat from Switzerland, and Vienna sausage from Austria.
Sausage is actually quite simple to prepare. It is nothing more than ground meat and seasonings packed into an edible casing and cooked. Sometimes it is smoked first; sometimes it is dried. There are almost as many ways to cook sausage as there are kinds — around two hundred — but unfortunately most cookbooks are deplorably vague about the details. (An exception is volume 2 of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.) Practically every recipe assumes the reader will be familiar with directions to case, stuff, and smoke. While these processes are not difficult, they do require learning certain skills. If you don’t master them, better stick to grilling hamburgers.
Casing is usually animal intestine — pork, beef, sheep, or goat — that has been thoroughly scraped and cleaned. It is purchased by the yard from a butcher, fresh or packaged in salt (treat the former like any perishable meat; salted casing lasts longer but still needs refrigeration). What you buy depends on the kind of sausage you’re making. The amount I bought for $1.50 looks like enough to accommodate an entire hog. Pork casings, generally used in ring sausages, are commonly available and are the easiest to use at home. Beef casings are thicker and form sausages that are larger in diameter. Sheep and goat casings are the smallest and most versatile, but they are also expensive and fragile. They are used for breakfast links, cocktail sausages, and frankfurters.
To prepare the casing for stuffing, soak in cold salted water for a couple of hours (not more than two), changing the water twice. Cut the casing into yard-long lengths. In all phases, handle the casing gently and be careful not to rip it with your fingernails. To rinse out, slip two fingers inside a length of casing and stretch the opening over your faucet. When you turn on the water, the casing should swell like a balloon.
And now comes the part that mystifies most people. You have to get all that ground meat into the long, tortuous casing. Despair not. Technology has a solution: the home electric meat grinder with a stuffing nozzle (in gourmet parlance it’s called a stuffing horn) that screws onto the grinder. This and a few simple directions are all you need to master the operation. Oh yes, and a friend: be advised that sausage making is best performed by two people.
First grind the meat, then attach the nozzle and feed the casing over it, slipping one end over the mouth and gathering the rest (it’s similar to putting on a knee sock). Let two or three inches of casing hang from the end of the horn. Now turn on the grinder and run some meat through until it just reaches the nozzle of the stuffer. Tie the end of the casing with cotton kite string and you’re ready to stuff your sausage.
Before you begin stuffing consider these things: how long you want each link to be; whether you want a string of links or separate ones; how pliant your meat mixture will be (when you twist and tie off the links, the casing can burst if the mixture isn’t soft enough). Stuff the sausage to the desired length, watching the casing closely for tears; turn off the machine. The force of the grinder is what works the casing off the nozzle. To avoid a lot of air bubbles, hold the casing horizontal to the nozzle as the meat goes in; for inevitable bubbles keep a needle handy and when necessary prick the casing to release the air. For separate links, cut the filled casing at the desired length and tie with a string, making the knot close against the meat. For a string of links you have two choices: (1) you can twist and tie off in the link size you want as you feed the meat into the casing or (2) you can fill the whole length of casing, remove from the nozzle, and then twist and tie into links.
If you don’t have a meat grinder, or if yours doesn’t have the stuffing gadget, you can improvise with a professional pastry bag or a large funnel and wooden spoon. You have to be pretty desperate for sausage though, or enamored of doing things the old-fashioned way.
What you do next depends upon the kind of sausage your are preparing. Many kinds are smoked first to enhance the flavor, then cooked later. Remember, smoking is not necessarily the same as cooking. If the internal temperature of the sausage doesn’t reach 160 degrees F, the sausage isn’t cooked. Much of the sausage’s unjust reputation as a health menace can be traced to a basic misunderstanding of this fact.
Texas farms always included a small wooden building designated as the smokehouse. If you don’t happen to own an old Texas farmhouse, your best substitute is a commercial smoker or oil-drum barbecuer. The idea is to create a lot of smoke but not much heat. Slow-burning wood like post oak is the best fuel, but charcoal sprinkled with sawdust will also work. Once the flames have died down, put the sausage in the smoker and try to maintain a temperature of around 90 degrees. If you’re just smoking, leave the meat in for at least six hours. If you’re smoking to cook, use a meat thermometer. You don’t want to be wrong.
Keep in mind that sausage is nothing more than seasoned ground meat. It is perishable and spoilable. Salt and spices do slow down oxidation in meat, thus acting as mild preservatives, but it would be best to think of seasoning as adding zing, and not longevity, to sausage. Fresh sausage should be refrigerated immediately and cooked within three or four days. Fresh-frozen sausage will keep for four to six months. Sausage cooked by smoking will keep for two weeks in a refrigerator.
Some recipes call for curing the sausage to preserve it, but curing employs chemicals, usually potassium nitrate, also known as saltpeter. Nitrates are currently highly controversial and possibly carcinogenic, and Consumer Reports, among others, urges that they be banned from food supply. Just treat sausage as you would any other meat and you won’t need any chemicals.
The Missing Link Recipes
Bernhard’s Sausage Seasoning
The Bernhard brothers are Hill Country butchers from Ingram who have been making sausage since the days when their father took them to far-flung ranches for butchering jobs. They sell a seasoning for venison or pure pork sausage that you can make yourself.
Smoked Venison Sausage
Sausage making has come to be one of the prime activities of the deer season in Texas. One of the best recipes I’ve found is a German link sausage, smoked to give it added resonance. Don’t be shocked by the quantity in this recipe. It assumes you are on good terms with a deer hunter.
Texas Turkey Ring Sausage
Another popular sausage indigenous to Texas is turkey sausage. The most famous purveyor of this local delicacy is Inman’s in Llano. They case theirs fresh, then barbecue it. If you do the same, your sausage will be somewhat drier than if you smoke it first. Smoking also produces a more robust flavor.
All-Beef Salami
For people without a grinder or stuffer I recommend this spicy salami. The seasonings in it are so heady, I’d have to class this sausage as strong.
Boudin Blanc
It comes as no surprise that when the French turn their attention to sausage the results are elegant. Don’t confuse this version with Louisiana’s Cajun-style boudin made from rice and pork scraps. The ingredients of the original French version are pristine and subtle.
Moroccan Lamb Sausage
Middle Easterners added their twist to sausage making by skewering sausages and cooking them on a brazier inside their tents.
Bratwurst
Another excellent summertime sausage is bratwurst, a traditional German sausage, light in color and delicate in taste.
Garlic Sausage
French bistros in New York have lately offered as an appetizer saucisson a l’ail, a hearty garlic sausage. The french stuff them into large beef casings, but you may use pork casings with no loss in flavor.
Knockwurst Wieners
All kids like frankfurters, but many parents are uneasy about the ingredients in store-bought wieners. Here is a simple recipe that will please all parties. Two people can complete the procedure in 45 minutes. These sausages won’t be as pink as the purchased variety because they contain no nitrates. If you stuff into 1 1/2-inch casing you’ll have knockwurst; in 3/4-inch casing, you’ll have wieners.
Summer Sausage
In Texas, there’s a product familiar to delicatessen shoppers usually billed as summer sausage. I’ve never quite figured out why it’s called this, except perhaps because it’s well seasoned and hence isn’t highly susceptible to spoilage. In other parts of the country, this same sausage is known as cervelat. It’s great for picnics.
