Homemade Sausage Making

Hi Guys,

This weekend is sausage making weekend.
With my family we have been getting a whole pig about 150-170KG each year and making cured sausage, pancetta and some mince for cooking with.

The basic reciepe we have been following is 15% fat (Good quality belly fat we purchase separately to make up for what we dont get from our pig)
28g salt per KG
1% fennel seeds
1% Cracked Black pepper
2 0r 3 bottles of dry red wine per 40 or 50kg of sausage
Over the years we have added chili flakes and a few other spices etc which is fine.

The issue i am consistently having is a crumbly texture in the finished product. This year i would really love to nail it!
I am going to use a culture in my mix plus a culture that i will apply to the casing while hanging.

We use 42mm hog casings.

Can anyone please talk to me about how to achieve the kind of texture i see a store purchased Cacciatore? I would like it to cut nicely and slices to hold together.

For hanging i simply do this in my shed, where i live in Australia the weather conditions are about right for the task 70-80%RH and 14-19deg C
I have had issues in the past with a little too much airflow which i think dried out my casings to early. This year i hope to combat this with placing a plastic sheet from my hanging board to the ground around my sausages to stop the breeze.

Thanks in advance for any assistance you may be able to provide.

Guessing but it could be a mixing problem or you may be adding to much wine and denaturing the mince. Keep the wine amount to under 1% by weight

Hi,

Mass produced dry cured sausage tends to have very firm, almost rubbery texture. Producers aim for this in order to be able to thinly slice the product and have it hold together. To achieve this they often add binding agents.

However personally I don't think this texture is a good thing - I would rather the product had a good bind, but was soft and easy to separate. If your product is even less bound than this then I'd guess either you aren't mixing it enough prior to stuffing, or the ingredients are stopping a good bind from forming.

- reddal

Hey jasonthebass!

I've been chasing that texture a a lot as well since it reminds a lot of polish sausages.
I love that bounce! My advice would be is to go old polish style and let the meat cure overnight ( 24hrs best) with just the salt.
I basically portion the meat so it fits into the grinder, weight it , salt it and let it sit in the fridge overnight without a cover.

I found that curing the meat overnight really helps the meat to gain that bouncy texture and allows the meat to hold the juices better.

My second advice would be to to separate the meat into classes, I mostly do A (being the nice lean meat with hard fat) and B (being the meat with a lot sinew, connective tissue, soft fat).
I grind the A class on larger plates while the B class gets ground into much smaller size allowing me to develop that "glue" that helps the meat to stick together.

Good luck!
Rad