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[madbaker]

This week's Bonus Resolution Recipe: Good sausage with pork or other meat.
The Saluminati had a meeting at Beltane for five years. Some of them were wildly successful both in attendance and inspiration. Unfortunately, it did not continue when I stopped making it happen. I didn't have the bandwidth to push it, and if it couldn't happen without my input then it clearly wasn't sustainable. Still a bit sad though.
With that in mind, here's a bonus Beltane Resolution Recipe.

When you wish to make good sausage with pork or other meat
Take some lean meat and some fatty meat trimmed of all its sinew and finely chop. If you have ten librae of meat, add one libra of salt, two ounces of well-washed fennel seeds, and two ounces of coarsely ground pepper. Mix well and let set for one day. Then take some well-washed and trimmed intestines and fill with the meat and then smoke to dry. (The Art of Cooking, 1450s)

1000 g beef chuck
22.5 g salt
2.5 g curing salt #2
5 g coarsely ground fennel seed
4 g coarsely ground pepper

50 mm hog casings
1/8 tsp Bactoferm Mold-600 culture
1/4 cup distilled water

Hand-chop the meat finely. Mix in the spices. Continue to mix until the meat becomes tacky. Refrigerate overnight. The next day, wash the casings thoroughly and knot the bottom of each casing used. Stuff and tie off at six-inch lengths, piercing with a needle or pin as necessary to fill evenly. Knot to finish.
Cold smoke the sausages with moderate wood smoke for two to four hours. Half an hour before removing the sausages from the smoke, whisk together the Bactoferm Mould culture and the distilled water. Let sit for 30 minutes to activate. Coat the sausages with the mixture and then hang them in a cool spot around 50-53° F and 75-80% humidity to dry. Depending on the width of the casings used, they should hang 4-8 weeks until the sausages have lost approximately 30-35% of their green (pre-drying) weight.

I added in the curing salt #2 for safety reasons; it helps prevent botulism bacteria from forming during the curing process and does not noticeably change the flavors.
A pound in 16th century Naples was approximately 321 grams, or roughly 0.7 modern pounds according to Archaic Units of Measure; a Neapolitan pound was twelve ounces rather than the modern sixteen. All the other measurements have been scaled accordingly and converted to metric.
I used a cold smoker and separated out the smoking and drying process, as I do not have a wood-fired chimney in which I can hang sausages. The drying instructions come from modern sausage and salami recipes that similarly call for smoking and then drying. The Bactoferm sausage mould is a commercial culture of harmless edible mold used in modern processes to help prevent more toxic molds from forming; it also aids in the drying process.

Sources
Maestro, Martino, Luigi Ballerini, Jeremy Parzen, and Stefania Barzini. The Art of Cooking: the First Modern Cookery Book. Berkeley: University of California, 2005. ISBN 0-520-23271-2.
Marianski, Stanley, and Adam Marianski. Home Production of Quality Meats and Sausages. Seminole, FL: Bookmagic, 2010. ISBN 978-0982426739.

What worked: This was a tasty, non-threatening hard sausage. It was basically a beef finocchiona. I upped the fennel significantly from modern recipes (2g); when I tried that level it wasn't noticeable. People seemed to like it when I walked around samples.

What didn't: It was exactly what I expected it to be.

Will I make it again? I don't need to make any for a while, but this will be a regular.

Comments

[threadwalker]

It was delicious. Thank you for sharing.