July 07, 2005
Bratwursts
Sausages in the Smoker
William gave a little "sausage class" to the other prep cooks (I think I was busy working on the pies at the time mostly) the day before the big BBQ. Sasuages are fun to make, and especially so since I have a stuffing horn. This makes the filling process go much faster.
Here's the spice blend and basic instructions (again from William).
The post-it note bratwurst sausage spice mix (per 6 lbs of meat):
3 T kosher salt (started with 2 T added about another T after tasting cooked sausage)
2 T black pepper
2 T ground mustard seed
2 t sugar
2 t finely minced garlic (garlic should not dominate the taste)
1 t majoram
1 t mace
1+ t nutmeg (a little more doesn't hurt esp. if you don't have mace)
1 t ground sage
1 cup water
Large plate grind meat w/o spices. Add spice and water and mix thoroughly. Re-grind on small plate. Load up the sausage horn and let 'er rip! (so to speak). Then go "wheee!".
As I mentioned before, we used about 2 pounds of a pork butt, 4 pounds of beef tri tip, and half a package of bacon. This last was added because we all decided that there wasn't enough fat in the other meat. Usually you want about 30 percent fat in sausages to keep them moist.
The other fun thing about sausages is washing out and using the casings. Tim had never done that before, so we made him do the washing. I'd gotten some salt packed casings that were actually fairly mild in odor, but you certainly knew someone had opened them. Lots of comments were also made when threading the casings onto the stuffing horn. Hey, it is what they originally made condoms out of anyway.
Oh yeah. Going "whee". When you make sausages, it's pretty common to "link" them into the individual "units." When you are dealing with 4 feet of filled sausage casing, however, you can't very easily twist each one. Instead, you pinch off three of them (ie, one to the left of your left hand, one to the right of your right, and the one in the middle). You then spin the middle sausage around 3 or 4 times, thus doing two twists at the same time. The appropriate thing to say when doing this is: "whee!!"
Posted by dowdy at July 7, 2005 01:03 PM