Homemade Sausage Making

French Style Ham Sausage
The French have rather narrow definitions in their extensive list of charcuterie products. Ham sausage is a specialty from eastern France made with finely textured forcemeat and cubes of ham. The sausage is stuffed into large casings (75mm and larger) and can be lightly smoked and then poached, or poached only. I have eaten this sausage in France as it was a staple in our sandwiches on a cycling tour, and decided to make my own. Using the recipe and detailed instructions in The Professional Charcuterie Series, I was able to make a sausage that came very close to what we were buying in French charcuterie shops.

Compared to the Polish ham sausage that I make on a regular basis, the French differs greatly in the flavour profile. The Polish version is very mildly seasoned and only with a small amount of pepper and barely hints of nutmeg and coriander. In the French style ham sausage the several seasonings and aromatics come out in full force: white pepper, mace, nutmeg, coriander, cloves, cinammon, chili powder, thyme and marjoram. Perhaps these seasonings are not to everyone`s liking, but we are very much enjoying the sausage in our home. I made the sausage with meat from one of the several pork legs I picked up on sale recently. For the emulsified portion I used trimmings from the leg with fat and lean meat wth connective tissue from the hock. The sausage was poached only, giving it that cleaner, fresher character.

Making this sausage is not difficult, but time consuming and labour intensive. In the end, it is well worth the effort, especially when the result is a tasty and professional quality product.

Meats
Lean meat from fresh ham (cubed) 600g
Pork trimmings, lean hock meat with connective tissue, and fat 400g

Seasonings for cubed meat - per 1000g (1 kg) of meat
Salt 18g
Cure #1 2g
Freshly ground white pepper 2g
Quatre épices* 1.5g
Ground coriander 1g

*Ground white or black pepper, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon

Seasonings for forcemeat - per 1000g (1 kg) of meat
Salt 18g
Cure #1 2g
Ground white pepper 2g
Nutmeg .08g
Coriander 2g
Mild spice blend** 2g
Ice cold milk 50ml

**Mild spice blend: 10g white pepper, 5g mild chili powder, 5g dried marjoram, 5g dried thyme, 5g mace, 5g nutmeg, 5g cloves, 3g coriander. (all ground)

Preparation
1. Cube the lean ham meat into 2-3cm pieces. Add the seasonings dissolved in a small amount of cold water and mix well until water is absorbed and the mixture is sticky. Place into the refrigerator for 24 hours.
2. Add the seasoning to the pork trimmings, grind with the 3mm plate once then emulsify with the iced milk using a meat chopper or kitchen food processor. Alternatively, grind with the 3mm plate a second time.
3. Blend the emulsified mixture with the cubed meat. Stuff into large collagen casings 75-100mm.
4. Set and dry the sausage at room temperature for 2-3 hours.
5. Smoke sausage at 50C (122F) for 2-3hours until proper colour is achieved (optional).
6. Immerse sausage into 75C (167F) water and poach for 2-3 hours until a minimum IT of 70C (160F) is reached.
7. Plunge sausage in ice water, adding more ice to cool it as fast as possible.

Looks good Red.Almost like a bierwurst. Did you smoke it or just poach?

Nice looking result! Being new to the game, how'd you go about stuffing that big chunky monster?

That looks beautiful!

That looks delicioso!

Sleebus- Welcome to the forum!

You use the large horn on your stuffer. Here is a pic from Stefans Ham kielbasa thread. More pics here: http://wedlinydomowe.pl/en/viewtopic.php?t=7574

Thanks for the complements guys, sometimes things turn out well! It may look like beerwurst, but 60% of the meat is in 1-1.5 inch cubes. Most of them are quite light in colour so it's a little difficult to see the definition. Flavour is of course different than beerwurst. This sausage is great served as a cold cut in a sandwich with mustard.

And as Bob pointed out, stuffing is done with the largest stuffing horn, and collagen casings are super strong, and can be stuffed really tight without bursting.

I had to come back and take another peek at this.

I'm going to have to make this. This is the type sandwich meat I like.

This looks great Red. Can you post the bibliographic reference for the text you referred to, please.

Hey Steve, thanks for visiting us!

The ham sausage recipe is found on pp. 182-184
The professional charcuterie series / Marcel Cottenceau, Jean-François Deport, and Jean-Pierre Odeau under the direction of Pierre Michalet ; translated by Anne Sterling.
Paris ; CICEM : New York : Van Nostrand Rheinhold,1991.

The only thing that differs in my version from the recipe is that I omitted the polyphosphates in the forcemeat.

redzed

Hey Chris, as always I like to add wild meat to my sausage. Just looking at this one, since it's 60% cubed pork to get those nice ham chunks in it I was thinking of doing the remaining 40% emulsion as 30% deer and 10% pork fat for the emulsion. What do you think? I have so much wild meat I don't want to make it 100% pork. I don't think adding a portion of wild to the cubed/cured would be too good.
thoughts?

I think venison will work very well, but maybe bump up the pork fat a bit. The ham cubes are all lean Class I pork and the deer meat is all lean, so you do need fat. Making the binding emulsion is a great way to use up some of the soft pork fat tissue and the venison with a sinew and silverskin. Might not be exactly what the recipe asked for, but we work with what we got. And the aromatics and spices that go into that sausage should be ge a good combo with venison.

And since I made this sausage I found out that the recipe is almost the same as for the German Bierschinken. Hardly surprising since according to my book, it states that it comes from "eastern" France.

Fatboyz, here is some venison I made a while back similar to what you are talking about. The sausage in the front is cubed venison in a pork emulsion. It tasted pretty good but when I make it again I think I'll take more time and cube and cure all the meat before further processing. I believe this should give more definition in the show meat. Another thing I've noted is the large the show meat the higher percentage of emulsion you need to insure against air pockets. The air pockets don't seem to hurt anything other than looks.

Thanks for the suggestions fellas. I think I'll try something like 60/40 pork/venison on the show meat cubes, and 50/50 on the emulsion plus pork fat.

That looks delicious.
A question, when you say "fresh ham" is that just fresh meat from the ham of the pig?
(ham to me is an already cured/cooked product) well i am originally from UK

Fusion5567 wrote:That looks delicious.
A question, when you say "fresh ham" is that just fresh meat from the ham of the pig?
(ham to me is an already cured/cooked product) well i am originally from UK

You are right but Redzed also notes the use of class 1 meat which allows you to go outside the rear leg. The polish meat mongers cared more about what type meat they were using than where it came from and this really makes a lot of sense when you are working with whole carcasses. By definition, Class 1 is very lean meat which can come from other parts of the pig. By definition this meat has to be boneless, have no sinews and the intramuscular fat must be less than 2 mm and contain no more than 15% fat. So, this expands your source of meat outside of the rear leg.

I've also noticed that Redzed often cures his diced meat for a day or so before processing so these small pieces will be cured ham when processed. I need to make myself do this more as well because it has benefits.

Hope this helps and if I followed you wrong Redzed I apologize.