Landjaeger is done!

 After fermenting for 2 days, then smoking, then hanging for 2 weeks, the landjaeger is done.  Here's a photo of the fermented sausage hanging in the smoker.  I used apple wood, figuring it's something reasonably local: Landjaeger is a southern German, Swiss, Austrian sausage, and there's plenty of apple trees in the area.  After smoking, I hung it at about 60 degrees/50% RH .

The recipes all say to monitor the mass to know when it is dry enough; so it started weighing about 35 ounces, then a few days later was down to 26, and still pretty squishy.  By a week, it was down to 21 ounces, and yesterday, it was at 17 ounces, about half the original weight. As it dried, it got darker, which is nice, because I was afraid that I hadn't put enough smoke into it, but it turns out that it's more about oxidation (I assume) than smoke that does the color. 

And here it is in cross section (because, hey, you have to cut some off and eat it!).  Tastes like landjaeger I've had before, so it's a winner. If you've not had landjaeger, it's basically kind of like jerky, serving the same general purpose of a dried, preserved meat for traveling.   I'm thinking about getting ready to do a slow fermented sausage next.. salami.

While we're looking at food from southern Germany, I also made some sauerkraut from a leftover half a head of red cabbage.  It's crunchy and sweet, just like it's supposed to be.

Landjaeger & Pate

The landjaeger has been stuffed and fermented for about 2 days now. A mixture of beef and pork with spices, stuffed into hog casings. (we had fun with the extra casings.. now I know where balloon animals came from).  I don't have official wooden landjaeger molds, so I squished them between a couple sheet pans for 48 hours.  The bacteria inoculation wants to ferment at 80F or so, which is convenient since it's been 80 in the garage for the past few days. 

You're supposed to dry the sausages for a bit, so we did that today, giving me a chance to take a picture.  Tomorrow evening, after another 24 hours of fermentation, (and I might add, they smell like they are fermenting.. a distinct acidic odor), I hit them with low temperature smoke for 4-6 hours, and then they go to cure for a couple weeks at 50-60 F (e.g. the temperature of the wine).

I got ambitious yesterday.. watching the DVD that comes with Jacque Pepin's new book I saw how you can bone out a chicken while keeping the skin intact to make a ballotine. It actually worked (although I'm not nearly as proficient and speedy as Jacque).

And, I made a pate (my first)... a pork tenderloin with a pork forcemeat around it, with a garnish of andouille. Tastes pretty good.

Viognier dessert wine

While making the Landjaeger, I opened a couple of bottles of Viongier dessert wine for a horizontal tasting. Both from Santa Ynez, both from 2010, from Bridlewood and Dascomb. What a difference.., The Dascomb was sweeter and much more complex, caramel, apple, etc.   The Bridlewood... apple juice.  Really.. that's the first impression for the Bridlewood.. tastes like apple juice.  The Dascomb has the apple-y flavor, but has more to it.

Interesting.

And the sausage is curing in the garage.  It needs to ferment for 48 hours at 80 F, and conveniently, it's been hot outside, so the garage is in the 75-85 range.   After that, 10-14 days of drying at 50-60 sort of temperature.  I forgot the sugar.. the recipe calls for dextrose, which I didn't have, and I was going to substitute sucrose or honey, but I forgot.  Oops.  Oh well.  Those hardy Swiss didn't have buckets of glucose sitting around 100 years ago.  The meat probably has enough sugar in it to feed the bacteria.

(dessert wine tasting was AFTER the sausage making, so consumption of wine had nothing to do with the omission of sugar)

Canadian Bacon

I made some Canadian Bacon using the recipe from Ruhlman's Charcuterie.  It's pretty simple, you cure in a brine (with pink salt as the curing agent) for a couple days, let it dry for a day, then smoke it to an internal temp of 150F.  The brine has a few spices in it, but basically, this is a smoked cured ham (made from pork loin).

It came out pretty much as expected.  There's a small non-pink spot in the middle: perhaps the brine didn't diffuse quite far enough in in the two days?  With the commercial product, they pump the brine into the meat under pressure to get better perfusion.

I want to try Kassler Ripchen which is a similar product, but in theory is smoked first, then brined.  Or maybe it's cured, smoked, brined.  It's hard to get a straight story online: there's tons of recipes, the vast majority of which are basically identical to the Canadian Bacon.  The original Kassler process is about 100 years old, and may have done things that aren't good practice today.

Also on the list to try is Landjaeger: a dried, cured, smoked sausage made from pork and beef. Think of it as southern German jerky.  It's a dry cured sausage, but not the months hanging like salami, just a couple weeks; but it is fermented (unlike the Pancetta).  I also have a tub of sauerkraut fermenting in the wine locker.