Homemade Sausage Making

So,
Long story long. I purchased some smoked breakfast sausage from a place in Kentucky USA called Broadbents Country Ham. If you haven't went to Broadbents site, it's a fun place for a look! Anyway, wife and I fell in love with their smoked breakfast sausage, comes stuffed in a long cloth tube/bag, smoked, not cooked, no nitrates/nitrites arrives un-refrigerated! Very salty, but very tasty! With a note saying not to worry if it arrives warm. So I wanted to come close to that type sausage at home. Took the recipe for breakfast sausage from Rytek's book, added a little more sage, ground a pound of bacon into to the meat mixture in a 10 pound recipe and stuffed it in a cloth tube/bag(ebay). Put it in my smoker at 200 deg. F. and smoked/cooked to 160 deg. F. After it cools I freeze it to assist pulling the bag off the product and not pulling chucks of product with it. Then Vacuum seal it. What this comes out as is a real great brown and serve patty. Just slice them off about a 1/2" thick and toss them in an iron skillet and brown to desired color. It's a win in our house for sure! Sorry, no photos.

Interesting. I wonder what their dry curing process is without nitrites. No listing of ingredients on the website. Your version is fine without nitrites because you cook it at 200F. Another way you can prepare "smoked" breakfast sausage patties is to add liquid smoke and prepare a fresh sausage. After frying the patties will be a bit more juicier than the already cooked one when they come off the skillet.

I'm thinking that it is the amount of salt. They some MSG too, but that has nothing to do with curing. One other note is, there is a lot of fat in Broadbents sausage. The one I make is the hit every time we cook it.

Apparently people in Kentucky like salty meats. My aunt, a foodie who lives in Kentucky, goes to ham auctions and has paid big bucks for hams which were extremely salty. She gave us one for Christmas and it was almost like you needed a glass of water with each bite. She said the saltier the better. I'm not knocking it but with hams as salty as this a ham would last a long time.

Country hams are salt cured, and need to be soaked for a day or two.

DanMcG wrote: ↑

Fri Dec 06, 2019 11:27

Country hams are salt cured, and need to be soaked for a day or two.

True, but these are salted far beyond any country ham I'd ever tasted but this is how she said they liked them.

Yeah, from what I've tasted there is a big difference in the saltiness between a Kentucky ham and one made right across the border in Tennessee.