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.

Andouille!

It's been a few weeks, and I've been working on the whole sausage thing some more.  I made the garlic and marjoram kielbasa out of the Ruhlman Charcuterie book.  Came out great, but I forgot to take pictures.  It was the first time I used natural casings and my new stuffing machine.  A few challenges with untangling the pieces of casing, but it worked out ok.  The natural casings are much easier to use than the collagen casings I used before.  And the hand crank stuffer is much easier than the auger on the KitchenAid mixer. (Thank you Sally, it was a wonderful Christmas present!)
I also figured out the linking in 3s thing. It's easier than you think.  Now if I can get my links even lengths, I'll be a happy charcuterist (or whatever it is en Francais).

The kielbasa came out pretty good, but it's a fairly mild sausage.. lots of garlic flavor, but beyond that, not something to knock your socks off and say "wow, that's the best sausage I've ever had".  We cooked a bunch up with cabbage and polenta & kale (sort of a hybrid Irish/Italian dinner). The rest got frozen after vacuum packing.  I need to figure out how to vacuum pack sausage without it squishing out, though. Maybe freeze the sausage first, then vacuum pack it?

So on to more flavor!  and that's hot-smoked Andouille, again from Ruhlman's book.  Hot smoked is cooked during smoking, so it can be eaten right after taking it out of the refrigerator. There's a cold smoked recipe, too, but that one needs to be cooked before eating, and I'm used to the hot smoked stuff from the store (Aidell's as it happens).  Did the grind and seasoning (it takes a bit of pink salt as a cure) and stuffed it, then put it in the smoker last night.  I used hickory, since that's all I had (I understand that pecan is what you're supposed to use).  It took a lot longer than I expected (started smoking at about 7PM, finally finished at 10:30PM.  And here's the product, sliced up for jambalaya (what else would you use Andouille for as a test?).

It tastes pretty good, but not much heat. Sort of a mildly spiced summer sausage with the dominant smoke flavor. Next time, more cayenne, I think.  I'm always a bit cautious on the pepper after trying some recipes from Bobby Flay that are blazing hot.

Each time, it gets easier. The whole stuffing process went a lot smoother, the links are generally more uniform.  I did make a small mistake, though: I linked in threes again, but it turns out you don't want them bundled like that when smoking, because the inside of the bundle doesn't get much smoke, nor does it get hot.  You want separate strands of links to hang from the hooks in the smoker. 

In the end, I pulled it out of the smoker when the internal temp got to 150 (I ran the smoker a bit hotter at the end 200 vs 180 recommended, because I wanted to go to bed).  Brought them inside, plunged them into icewater to cool it down and stop the cooking.  I cut the links apart, dried them off, and they went into the refrigerator. 

Now, what do I do with 2-3 pounds of Andouille?  I've sort of standardized on 1.5 kg batches of meat: it's a convenient amount to handle and grind and stuff.  Gosh, though, if I do 3 pounds of sausage a week, we only eat about a pound or so a week, and we'll have a freezer full of sausage before you know it.  Maybe I need to get going on the long time cure stuff.

Grinding pig for sausage

Just some photos of grinding pork cushion meat up for sausage.  It's pretty straightforward using the KitchenAid grinder. As the cookbooks say, keeping things cold is important, so we start with chilling the grinder down before attaching it to the mixer.

And, then, you have your almost frozen meat.  I get the big hunk o'pig from the store (10-25 lbs in a package, cushion meat is around 10-12 lbs) and portion it into 2-2 1/2 batches, cut into 2 inch cubes then freeze it.  When I'm ready to grind, I thaw the batch out, partially, then cut it into 3/4-1 inch chunks (about the right size to drop down the throat of the grinder).

This the bag of frozen cushion meat before grinding, partly thawed.

There is no question that the whole "partially frozen" thing makes life much easier.  Not only is it easy to cube the meat, but it keeps the grinder cold.  Cold grinder means fat doesn't melt, which makes for much better sausage.  Note that this is pretty lean meat here because I've trimmed the fat and am going to grind it separately.

Keeping things cold while grinding is important, so the bowl catching the ground meat sits in a bowl of ice and water.

 

Hmm. Have to figure out how to rotate images

Here's what it looks like coming out of the coarse plate and in the bowl.

Finally, you get to the end, and there's this annoying sort of plug of meat at the end when you pull the auger out. You can run some paper towel down the grinder to push this out, but, on the other hand, it's not all that much.
So what is this "cushion meat"?  I wasn't up for buying a whole package of shoulder at Smart & Final (about 25 lbs, which is actually two shoulders), so I got the cushion which is about 9-10 lbs.  Turns out it's a leaner cut lower down on the front leg than the shoulder (I guess, it's the bicep, rather than the deltoid).  Often it's used for pulled pork and such, or cut into "ham steaks", even though it's nowhere near the back of the pig, where ham comes from.  In any case, it makes fine sausage, but you have to get some fat to mix with it, and that's a bit of a chore.  All the sausage recipes (e.g. Alton Brown) talk about using "fat back", but no supermarket around here seems to have fat back.  Fat backis the fat layer on the back of the pig, under the skin, above the loin/ribs, and is a nice hard fat which makes good sausage.  Think of the fat layer in good bacon or on a steak: it's firm and dense, and grinds well without turning into mush.

Sometimes you can get scraps of fat at the supermarket that they've trimmed off the pork they've packaged, but it's an iffy thing. Somehow, paying $3/lb for scraps of fat to mix with your $1.50/lb lean meat seems weird.  I found that I can get pig back (with skin on..) at a local meat market that does Mexican style cuts, but you have to strip the skin and trim the meat off.  It's what they make chicharrones from. I have no idea what the cut is actually called.