Beginner`s Sausage-Making Tips from Jason Story (2/5/13)
Here are a few ideas that might help your chances for success in your very first attempt.
Use a coarser grind. The coarser grind will allow the batch to dry more quickly. Fine grinds create more pathways for water to maneuver around on its way to reach the surface and evaporate. The larger plate also helps prevent fat smearing quite as easily.
Use a 45mm beef middles. This way you will be able to use a larger stuffing tube. The larger the stuffing tube, the less friction will be created, which means you will be less likely to smear the fat. It is a good idea to cure the meat one day prior to grinding and that can stiffen up the mass the next day during stuffing. Unless you are using wine, you can't introduce water to loosen the mixture, so the larger casing/stuffing tube helps you learn the nuances of spotting potentially smeared fat. Also, beef middles are tougher than smaller diameter hog casings. 32mm hog casings casings can sometimes tear or rip when connected and hung in long strands and subjected to a moist, warm environment for a prolonged period of time. When we do use 32mm casings, we have a special way of tying so the strand of sausages are supported. Letting the stuffed 32mm casings dry out on a rack for a few hours to toughen up also helps prevent tearing later on.
Use a starter culture that will give a more severe ph drop. This will shorten the aging process so you can test the results sooner. That way, if you need to make adjustments, you don't have to wait as long to implement changes. Also, the shorter aging time leaves less risk if the environmental conditions are hard to control.
Know the conditions you need to achieve during fermentation and be able to control that. You don't want a temperature spike or an excessive increase in humidity to add an unknown variable of failure that you might not be able to discern later on in the aging process.
Inoculate the sausages with mold spray after fermentation. Or, buy an artisan's salami with mold coating on it and rub it all over the sausages immediately after fermentation. That way, harmful ambient molds wont come to rule your roost.
