To Fatty Sausage

[markjass]

To Fatty Sausage

For the last few days the weather has been bad. It has been about 6 degrees all day with horizontal sleety/rainy showers. It looks like we will be lucky and will miss the heavy snow. Anyway I have decided to experiment and make a odds and sods sausage. My recipe

Pork Belly 350 grams
Pork Shoulder 400 grams
Beef Brisket 250 grams
+salt, pepper and spices

Put them in 5 cm fibrous casings
let them hang in room temperature for an hour and then placed them in my smoker (If I had thought about it I would have made the sausages yesterday and kept them in the fridge overnight. That may have improved their colour.

What I did.
I managed to keep my smoker between 50 and 60 degrees while I heated the sausages for an hour and a half (smoked them for the last 30 mins)
.
The weather was so bad that I retired to the kitchen. I then poached the sausages at 72-80 degrees until they reached 70 degrees. I then put them in a bowel in the sink and ran cold water over them until they became cool. I noticed that the sausages were encased in fat. I took the casing off heated a saucepan of water to nearly boiling water. Plunged the sausages in the water for 30 seconds and then placed the sausages back into cold water. This shifted the excess fat. They look like a teenagers face scared with acne pock marks. Once sliced they look fantastic and they taste great.

The question I ask myself is why did I get so much fat melti?
The pork shoulder was fatty, should I have cut back on the pork belly?
Any thoughts?






Mark

[Cabonaia]

Hi Mark - I made some fuet recently with soft fat, and though the taste is great, it is greasy and doesn't feel good in the mouth. Unlike what you made, fuet is a dried sausage, so I have very tasty but very greasy Spanish salami. It works well in cooking, but sadly not eaten by the slice.

A couple things come to mind regarding your experiment:

- You used too much fat, and the fat you used was belly fat, which has a low melting point. Backfat is better, and 30% is enough. Your pork belly was >50% of the meat, and the pork shoulder may have had 20-30% fat in it already. That's a lot.
- You may have heated them up too fast in the water bath. Also, you said you removed them from nearly boiling water. So maybe it got above 80C?

If the texture came out fine and not dry, seems the primary problem was too much fat in general, and too much soft fat.


Others will have ideas I am sure.

Cheers,
Jeff