Homemade Sausage Making

I'm so hungry I could eat a horse!

We hear that often but very few people, given the opportunity, would actually eat horse meat, even if they were seriously hungry! I really have no qualms about eating horse meat but have eaten it only a few times in my lengthy carnivorous life time. Many decades ago when I spent a year in Europe on an exchange scholarship, I had steak tartare at a restaurant made from horse meat filet. The waiter explained that it was as close to the original as possible since it was invented by the Tartars who not only rode horses but also ate them. Vodka flowed freely that night so I don't remember the taste. Then, somewhere along the way, I also had an Italian horse meat stew and three years ago my father made a Polish sausage for a friend that was 50/50 horse and pork. It was fabulous! But what has made the greatest impression, and has continually simmered in the back of my mind for the past decade is a saucisson sec de cheval that I tasted in French Catalonia. There was outdoor market in each town and village once a week and vendors would travel back and forth with their products. The butchers operated out of refrigerated trucks and there were always several varieties of dried sausages available, including those made from horses and donkeys. At the time I was not interested in making dry sausages and knew nothing about the process. But I was beginning to appreciate and like the Southern European dry cured sausages and found the idea of horse dried horse sausage quite intriguing. And finally now I got around to making my own version of saucisson sec de cheval .
A couple of weeks ago I sourced some horse meat from Montreal, paying double what an expensive cut of beef would cost. Actually the cost shocked me, so I hope it's worth the effort. The saucisson contains 50% horse meat from the loin and rump, 30% lean Class I pork (no connective tissue or fat) from the ham and butt, and 20% back fat. And there is another first here for me since I used Safepro® B-LC-007. Chr. Hansen markets this starter culture as the bacteria "with the license to kill", as it is apparently effective in eliminating listeria. I made a total of 6kg, all but one cased in beef middles. The saucisson has now finished the fermentation stage and is currently in my curing chamber. One chub was cased in the Umai 50mm salami tube and hung in my utility fridge.









Saucisson sec de cheval

Meats
Horse meat, class I (no fat or connective tissue) 500g
Lean pork, class I, (no fat or connective tissue) 300g
Back Fat, 200g

Ingredients per 1000g (1 kg) of meat
Salt 22g
Cure #2 3g
Granulated garlic 4g
Mixed peppercorns, coarsely ground 5g
Hot chili powder 1g
Herbes de provence 1tsp
Mace .5 g
Brandy 1tsp
Dextrose 1g
Sucrose 1g
Erythorbate .5g
B-LC-007 - 3/4 tsp used for the 6kg meat block

Instructions
1. Cut horse and pork meat into 3-4cm. cubes, fat into slightly smaller ones.
2. Add the salt, #2 and erythorbate to the horse and pork meat (may be combined at this statge) and cure in fridge for 48 hours. Add salt to the fat and also place in fridge. Make sure that the meat and fat are covered well.
3. Freeze the fat and semi-freeze meat before grinding. Run the fat though the 7mm. plate and the meat through the 12mm.
4. Add the rest of the ingredients to the ground meat and mix throughly.
5. Stuff into beef middles and tie with string or net.
6. Ferment at 20-22C and 90+RH until pH reads 5.2 or lower. (Mine unfortunately dropped faster than expected and after 36 hours was at 4.83)
7. Dry at 75-85% RH until weight drops by 35-40%
8. Surface starter optional.

Wow that was a fast Ph drop with only 3 grams of sugar per kilo added! Learning curve with a new culture.

You ground the fat separately?

Thats one pricey salami!!!!

Bob K wrote:Wow that was a fast Ph drop with only 3 grams of sugar per kilo added! Learning curve with a new culture.

That took me by surprise but I took the initial pH reading after the meat was ground and the spices mixed in. And I also cured the meat for 2 days before grinding and stuffing. Some natural fermentation would have taken place during that period. Horse meat is naturally sweeter in taste, so maybe it in fact contains more sugar? Have to research this one. My fermentation temp was a steady 22C, so next time I use the James Bond starter I will take it to 20C. So now that the pH dropped below 5 the saucisson will probably have a bit of tang.

Bob K wrote:You ground the fat separately?

Yeah, I was hoping to have distinct white pearls of fat but it did not turn out that way, even though the fat was frozen. While I did not have "fat smearing" the fat came out soft and in long strings, and and I had a heck of a time mixing it into the meat. Next time I make a salami type sausage I will try my bowl chopper.

Bob K wrote:Thats one pricey salami!!!!

Sure is! Will be rationed and served only on special occassions!

redzed wrote:Yeah, I was hoping to have distinct white pearls of fat but it did not turn out that way, even though the fat was frozen. While I did not have "fat smearing" the fat came out soft and in long strings, and and I had a heck of a time mixing it into the meat.

I tried on several occasions to grind fat separately and mix (recommended by a former contributor to this forum who probably never tried it) and never had success. Grinding the frozen fat with the meat works best for me.

I bet the bowl chopper will work fine. You could add the fat after a few passes through the meat.

Just thought I would update on my horse meat saucisson. Unfortunately the project was an expensive and disappointing failure. Despite losing a substantial amount of weight, the sausage remained soft and mushy, had an off smell and tasted bitter. I could only speculate as to the cause but probably it's down to one of two or three things. It fermented properly so I have to rule that out. So that leaves me with fat smearing, and the quality of the horse meat. Although I froze the fat before grinding, I ground it separate from the meat. It came out of the grinder like long strings of spaghetti. As a result, in my effort to combine the fat and meat, I probably overworked it and allowed it to get too warm. It would have been better for the fat to come out crumbly and pellet like. I should have ground the fat and meat together, or at least a portion of the meat with the fat. The pic below does not show clear fat and meat definition, a tell tale sign of fat smearing. And it's interesting to note that the one salami in the umai bag failed as well.

But the quality of the meat still is questionable. In the the US horse meat is not sold for human consumption due to the high use of antibiotics and other medications in horses. In Canada, horse meat is inspected for antibiotics and permitted on the market. I bought mine in Montreal where it is readily available in butcher shops. Sadly, I paid $125 for the 5lbs of horse flesh. Now the funny thing is that even though I inoculated the saucisson with surface starter, absolutely no mould ever grew on it as it hung for months surrounded other angel white salami. There was definitely something in it that prevented the mould. Did I buy meat with antibiotics? Did the inspection system fail me? Difficult to say, but in the end, the failure was a double whammy: fat smearing and tainted meat.

So what can we learn from my misadventure? The first is that when making fermented dry cured sausages, we need to make it from quality meat, and the second is that we have to do everything possible to avoid fat smearing. This starts out with grinding with sharp knives, freezing the fat and semi freezing the meat, and keeping it cold as possible during the mixing and stuffing. It is also important to use good hard back fat and to trim off the soft intra-muscular fat from the meat. The fat should not be old, as it can get rancid even in the freezer So it's not a good idea to buy a years' supply of fat at a time.

redzed wrote:It fermented properly so I have to rule that out.

I would think that that antibiotics would have prevented the bacteria in the culture from working from the outset.

The mold not growing is a real mystery, it almost seems as if something was treated with an mold inhibitor like Potassium Sorbate

This is a quite timely article published today on Meating Place. It is a timeline and discussion of the banning of the sale of horsemeat in the United States. (Blame it on Bo Derek!)

Food (Safety) Fight By Richard Raymond

Dr. Richard Raymond is the former undersecretary of agriculture for food safety.
Horse slaughter: Just the facts, ma`am

(The views and opinions expressed in this blog are strictly those of the author.)

On Jan. 5, 2015, Meatingplace.com had an article about FSIS raising rates for inspection done outside the normal hours of business.

Colleen Michaels managed to work the ban on horse slaughter into the reader comment conversation that followed.

Not only did she and others misrepresent some of the facts surrounding the issue of horse slaughter in the United State, she said, "FSIS should have the balls to tell the government that inspection could not be `divided-up` to be defunded in being paid by specie...."

Many responders jumped on the old bandwagon rhetoric that this ban on horse slaughter was all the doing of PETA and other animal rights organizations. While those organizations were vocal, the people I saw the most in the halls of Congress urging for a ban were Bo Derek and T Boone Pickens.

Here are the facts and timelines as I remember them:

June 6, 2005: Representative John Sweeney, R-NY, proposed an amendment to the 2005-2006 Ag Appropriations Bill that would prohibit the use of federal funds for horse slaughter inspection. It passed 269-158.

Sept. 20, 2005: Senator John Ensign, R-NV, offered a Senate version that passed 69-28

Nov. 10, 2005: The Ag Appropriations Act was signed into law.

H.R. 2744-45, Sec. 794 read: "Effective 120 days after enactment of this Act, none of the funds available in the Act may be used to pay the salaries or expenses of personnel to inspect horses under Section 3 of the Federal Meat Inspection Act..."

Well, if you can`t inspect them, you can`t get them dead.

Feb. 8, 2006: USDA/FSIS issued a new regulation (CFR 352.19) that allowed existing horse slaughter facilities to circumvent the ban on horse slaughter by paying FSIS for the inspection.

When I was asked by elected officials how we could blatantly ignore the obvious intent of both the House and Senate, I replied that the language, as written, was simply to ban the funding for inspection, not ban the slaughter of horses.

Sept. 8, 2006: The House passed the American Horse Slaughter Act but it died in the Senate.

March 8, 2007: The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that it was illegal for slaughterhouses to pay the USDA for their own inspection and FSIS pulled its inspectors from horse slaughter facilities on March 9, 2007. (But they continued to receive payment from the Bison industry to inspect those critters that were headed for interstate sales.)

Nov. 18, 2011: The Ag Appropriations Bill for 2012 was signed into law with no reference to the ban on funding, essentially making it possible once again for horses to get dead for human consumption.

Jan. 14, 2014: The ban was once again reinstated as part of the Omnibus Appropriations Act

In the meantime, both Illinois and Texas, the only two states where there were horse slaughter facilities, passed laws prohibiting the killing of horses for human consumption or possessing horse meat for sale or trade in those states and both laws survived judicial scrutiny when appeals were filed by the slaughter facilities.

So, Colleen, I think FSIS did the right thing in trying to find an alternative and showed intestinal fortitude in doing so.

But when I was installed as the Undersecretary for FSIS I also took an oath to follow the laws of the United States.

To do less than that would be a demonstration of not having a lick of "good horse sense."

1/25/2016