Blandish. Meant.

[madbaker]

This week's Resolution Recipe is a remake of one I did before. To make a sausage [beef].
It didn't work then; it got too hot and rendered into what I optimistically called Thin James. Then it dried into jerky. Bland, tooth-cracking, dry-as-sawdust jerky. I threw away the lot. This has been in the back of my head since as one I wanted to retry and get right.

Take Martinmass beef [salt beef], or if you can not get it, take fresh beef, or the lean of bacon if you will. You must mince very small that kind of flesh that you take. And cut lard and put it into the minced meat, and whole pepper, and the yolks of seven eggs, and mingle them altogether. And cut the meat into a gut very salt, and hang him in the chimney where he may dry. There let him hang a month or two before you take him down. (The Good Huswife’s Iewell, 1596)

1 kg (2.2 lbs) beef cross-rib or chuck roast
350 grams (0.75 lbs) pork back fat
13.5 grams whole peppercorns (I lightly crack about half, because I like a bit more pepper flavor to permeate the sausage)
3.375 grams curing salt #2
31 grams salt
2 large egg yolks

casings: beef casings of desired thickness
1/4 cup distilled water
1/4 teaspoon Mold-600 Bactoferm Sausage Mould

Chop the beef and fat together; thoroughly mix with salts, pepper, and egg yolks. Rinse casings as needed. Knot bottom of each casing used; stuff and twist at desired lengths, piercing with a needle as necessary. Knot to finish.

Cold smoke the sausages for one to four hours, depending on thickness and desired smokiness. 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% of their weight.

Modern egg yolks are generally larger, so I reduced the number. Other measurements have been converted to grams to make scaling easier.
I added 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. As I used fresh beef I added salt.

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 adds flavor and aids in the drying process.

What worked: These didn't fail. I was far more careful about the cold smoking (very low amount of coals, ice water in the pan) and kept it mostly around 100 degrees. There was a bit of rendering but not the full-on fat elimination of the previous batch. The hand-chopping makes them pretty and they are somewhat bland to my taste, but "accessible" cured sausages.

What didn't: They were bland. I used 10 g pepper as a scaled-up version of 7.5 g pepper (1350 g meat total, pivot on that rather than 1000 g meat) but should have used 10 g pepper as a base.

Will I make it again? I will keep it in the book. Even with a proper amount of pepper it's never going to be exciting; there just isn't much to go on. However, beef sausages are rarer and so as an alternate to pork it's worth doing. Next time I'll probably do this in 55mm beef casings (this one was in 35mm hog casings to dry quicker so I could test it).

Comments

[hrj.livejournal.com]

There's something just a little odd to me about turning salted beef into sausages. I guess it's: the point is preserving, so if you've preserved by one method already, why go to the trouble of converting it to a different method?

[madbaker.livejournal.com]

That one puzzles me too. The only thing that springs to mind is that you process the whole cow at slaughter, and then you can make smaller amounts into sausages later for different uses. But that's a guess.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

There might be a reason why beef sausages are rarer. I've always been disappointed, and eventually reluctantly came to the ermpiric conclusion that pork just makes a better sossidge.

[madbaker.livejournal.com]

Agreed!