Weekend sausage

[Butterbean]

I'll start out by saying, sugars confuse me but I believe you may be confusing sweetness with fermentability. Fermentability of a sugar isn't directly related to our perception of sweetness. Dextrose is a very simple sugar and can be used quickly whereas table sugar is more complex and takes a bit longer for the microbes to break down but in the end they will both yield the same amount of acidity only it may take the table sugar a little longer to achieve this. I think this is why dextrose is recommended so often because it will allow you to reach the acid safety hurdle quicker but this can come at a cost, ie less depth of flavor things like that.

Here is a link to an abstract of some research conducted at Clemson which you might find helpful.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs ... .tb01245.x

[redzed]

Thx Chris. There is definitely a tang but certainly not sour. If fact, apart from the store bought, visual is slightly different but the taste is almost bang on. So I guess what's confusing me, and that's because I don't know enough about this stuff yet, is in an earlier post you stated to add 6-8 gm sugars. By "sugars" I meant all sugars, including dextrose (which is glucose made from corn), sucrose, fructose, maltose, lactose etc. As Butterbean pointed out, the sweetness indicator is not relevant. It's how efficiently the different carbohydrates (sugars) are metabolized by the lactic bacteria in producing lactic acid Dextrose is 20% less sweet so therefore 7.2 - 9.6 gm. Actually both glucose, fructose and sucrose will achieve the lowest pH with very close results, except that glucose and fructose will get there a bit faster. Maltose will be about one third less and lactose about half. From what I understand, if the culture has eaten up its food source, then the "sourness" would stop. Yes, but the lactic bacteria stops producing acid once it reaches a level where the environment is too acidic. In meat meat products it is usually around 4.6 If there is more sweetener and the fermentation stops then the left over sugars don't get used up as a food source and that just becomes a waste. Some of the sugars may also be metabolized by non-fermentative bacteria and the rest will be there as residual sugar which may come through in the flavour.There should be different levels of tanginess if I ferment 24 vs 48 vs 72 hrs. I should be able to control the palatable tang with the length of fermentation time and stop it regardless of the amount of sweetener? Yes if you are going to smoke and heat treat the sausage you can stop the fermentation anytime and put it into the smoker. But the way it works is that the amount of carbohydrate determines the final acidity and the temperature affects the speed of the acidification. Obviously, if there isnt enough sweetener, nothing happens.

If so, you can use just about any culture, where you will utilize only the fermentative bacteria and not the gram positive bacteria. Ferment at 30C, adding 6-8g of sugar per kg

[jjnurk]

Well it was an excruciating -40C weekend here in beautiful Regina, so why not make some kaszanka and salceson.

I cooked up all the meats in one pot, consisting of pork hocks, heart, side pork, trimmings from a pork butt and at the end threw in a liver. I seasoned the stock with some crushed mustard seeds, bl pepper, garlic, bay leaves and salt. After a few hrs, took out what I wanted for the kaszanka, ground it,

and added 750 gm of pearl barley and 750 gm of buckwheat. Total amount of meat was around 3 kg. I cooked the grains in the meat stock, added to the meat and 1 L of blood.

For making it the first time and actually eating it the first time, it wasn't too bad. I'm going to have to think about it a bit more if this is something I'll want to be doing in the future .

[redzed]

Kaszanka looks great! Try it on the grill (once you are out of the deep freeze).