Bratwurst Bramberger Art

1.4kg pork belly
750g smoked streaky bacon
28g salt
4.0g white pepper
2.9g mace
3g cardamom
2.0g Marjoram
20ml white wine
175ml milk
2 large eggs
This recipe asked for the meat to be coarse ground, spices added and then the whole lot to be fine ground. I didn't like the texture of the finished sausage. I was too fine and bitty. I definitely prefer my sausages to be either coarse ground and meaty or fully emulsified in a blender.
The spice mixture of this sausage is wonderful, though I wasn't sure what happened to the Marjoram. Definitely one to do again.

Boerewors

1.9 Kg beef
1.0Kg pork belly
40.0g salt
10g ground black pepper
16.5g ground coriander seeds
2.1g (25) ground cloves
0.8 (1/2 nut) ground nutmeg
7g ground allspice
15g brown sugar
125ml red-wine vinegar (or wine)
hog casings

This is a South African sausage recipe and one I had been intrigued by for quite a while. There are many different recipes to choose from on the net and I settled on this one, measuring out the ingredients by volume and recording the gram weights. I prefer to work in gram weights. My fine scales are accurate to 0.1g which is good even for accurate weighing of things like ground nutmeg.

I course-minced the meat twice before stuffing, mixing the meat, spices and vinegar after the first time through mincer.

Again this was a sausage that I was taking to a friend's bbq. I don't mind taking a punt on a new recipe and seeing how it turns out. It's good to have a large group of beta testers.

There were two problems with this recipe.

Firstly, the clove was overpowering - too much clove and not ground fine enough. I had the same issue when I made the Boudin Blanc so it is slowly dawning on me that this is a spice to watch. Next time I will halve the quantity of cloves to allow the other spices to come through.

But the biggest problem was the the meat was too dry. I bought great quality beef skirt from my favourite butcher. There was not a drop of fat on it, much like the venison that I used recently. I didn't add any pork fat and while the pork belly I used was beautifully fatty, there just wasn't enough to add the required juiciness to the finished article. So some pork fat or a higher proportion of pork belly would be needed next time around

Italian Sausage with Fennel 2

1.6kg pork shoulder
0.5kg hard pork fat
30g salt
15g ground black pepper
15g crushed garlic
7g whole fennel seed
3g ground fennel seed
125ml iced water

This is a slightly simplified version of the recipe I used last time.

I was more delicate with the pork fat this time and spent some time chilling it in the freezer to make it easier to handle and with less chance of smearing. This made a big improvement in the way the fat handled. I think it would work straight from frozen too, which is something I should try the next time I use a recipe that calls for pork fat.

I also cubed the fat with a knife rather than putting it though the mincer. I don't know it this was strictly necessary, but I was pleased with the result. However, it did take an age, so next time the fat will be minced in the machine from frozen.

These sausages were taken to a friend's bbq and went down very well. I love 'em.