Homemade Sausage Making

Has anyone given any specific thought as to why we don`t see marinated meats being stuffed into sausage casings? The closest I`ve found is Chuckagon`s "Oui Oui Water" recipe for injected pork roasts. Lots of folks out there (yes, dem Cajuns is real folks, too!) enjoy injecting all sorts of flavorings into meats and cooking them, but I haven`t seen anyone grind the meat up and stuff it into hog casings. Why is dat? ...er, that? As Yogi Berra might answer if he were a Cajun 1st year French student, "Je ne sais pas, but I don`t know."

Aside from moisture content control, is there any reason why the following shouldn`t be a good technique? We enjoy mixing:
» 2 parts lemon juice
» 1 part cider vinegar
» 1 part olive oil
» several (plus some more!) smashed cloves of garlic
» several sprigs of fresh rosemary, washed, leaves stripped and chopped
» salt & pepper
and soaking pork, beef, or chicken in it overnight before grilling the next evening.

I just ground up some rotgut pork shoulder (cut up, divided, recombined to 25% fat) which was marinated in the above mixture. The excess marinade gets discarded, and the excess fat gets saved for the next sausage project.

...would enjoy hearing your comments. If it`s a good idea, how`s about recipe?

I think that the reason you don't see marinated meat used in sausages is that the resulting sausage would be very crumbly because the acid interferes with the binding of the meat.
Crumbling isn't usually a desired trait in any well known fresh sausage other than Mexican chorizo.

Some Cajun's do make a sausage from pickled pork, but that doesn't commonly contain acid.

Hmmm... Good point. I suspect that the reason there is vinegar in Mexican-style chorizo is an attempt to get a little of the tang of a fermented sausage (like Spanish chorizo or salami) without doing the fermenting.

Crumbly or not, it's tasty. I'll let you know how it comes out after a day or so of seasoning. The fried test patty version is pretty good, although it needs salt. Maybe a simple sauce would complement it, like sauce does for the grilled cut-of-meat version.

I tend towards soy sauce in most of my marinades.

Wife is gluten intolerant, so soy sauce is out. (The fermenting starter is wheat-based.) There's a gluten-free soy sauce, but it's a bit pricey. We seem to have gotten away from soy sauce, which is a pity because there are some great marinades based on it. Likewise hoisin sauce.

We tend toward vinaigrette mixtures with garlic and local herbs. Rosemary is taking over the front yard; sage, the side yard. The deer eat most of our attempts at cilantro, unfortunately.

El D - have you tried fish sauce? It's a great interchangeable substitute for soy sauce, and I believe it is gluten free. What I like about it, besides the flavor, is that it doesn't darken up everything it touches, as does soy sauce. Great for marinades, stir fries, etc. it smells fishy straight from the bottle, but that quickly goes away. Dirt cheap, too. I get it at Vietnamese stores.

Thinking a little further, I suppose that if the bulk of your seasoning was of, say, red wine or beer or honey and something, it would be called marinating. Suppose, for example, making sausage out of sauerbraten.

For that matter, suppose you braised some beef and, instead of serving it as pot roast, stuffed it plus potatoes into sausage casing?

Cabonaia wrote:El D - have you tried fish sauce?

Yum. Great idea! The Vietnamese angle is a good one to try- - each family seems to have its own mixture of fish sauce, vinegar, hot sauce, and rice wine. (I can taste the bun [rice vermicelli] already.) If I marinated and grilled the pork like they do for bun, then stuffed casing with... Hmmm...

I use the same seasoning process for my shawarma sausage that is used in making authentic shawarma - marinating the lamb in onion juice before grinding and stuffing. I'm working on a char siu sausage that will involve marinating the pork before stuffing, too.

Tom, that shawarma recipe sounds great! Would you mind sharing? (Is it already posted?)
Ditto on the char siu- - I'm not familiar with that one, but knowing you, I bet it's really good. Thanks.

Duck
No offence, you`re a quack, but in an entertaining / interesting way

Wally ol' boy,
The Duck is a "Quack UP"... the poor man! When he was just a lad, he ran the 50 yard dash inside a 49 yard gymnasium!
His mother used to feed him walnuts with a slingshot. She got a little distracted one day and nailed him right between the eyes!

el Ducko wrote:Tom, that shawarma recipe sounds great! Would you mind sharing? (Is it already posted?)
Ditto on the char siu- - I'm not familiar with that one, but knowing you, I bet it's really good. Thanks.

Sure, when I have them finalized. I'll soon be posting two variations on a medieval German bratwurst, and an Irish Whiskey sausage I'm developing, too.

Baconologist wrote:the resulting sausage would be very crumbly because the acid interferes with the binding of the meat.

You are right. The marinated pork sausage didn't bind at all. Back to the drawing, er, cutting board. I'll leave the acids out next time.