General principles for preparing beef sausage
To make homemade beef sausage, you should choose good cuts with a small amount of fat. The best sausage comes from the neck , but you can also use other parts. However, we must remember that if you take a piece from a leg, the dish will turn out very dry, tough and rather rough. To make ham sausage more tender and juicy, add a little pork to the beef, preferably fatty pork.
There are many recipes for homemade beef sausage. Usually this is boiled sausage, but you can also make it dry-cured or smoked if you have a smokehouse. There are also several options for preparing minced meat .
Firstly, minced meat can be prepared using a meat grinder with a large or fine grid.
Secondly (and many consider this method the best), the meat can be chopped or cut into cubes with a side of 2-8 mm, depending on the recipe.
Sometimes you need to add bacon (or lard) to the minced meat for homemade beef sausage: either in a meat grinder, or chopped in the same way as meat.
If you need to add bacon, be very careful when choosing it. It should be dense, white or slightly pinkish in color, not sticky or loose, but elastic. It should smell pleasant.
It goes without saying that the beef should be perfectly fresh, dense, with the smell of meat, without any extraneous odors. If you have the opportunity to purchase meat from a farmer you know, then this is just the right option. If not, you can make acquaintances with sellers at the market. They often leave the best pieces for regular customers.
When you bring the meat home, you should wash it and inspect it very carefully so as not to miss any bone fragments that may remain in the meat after cutting. The meat near the bone should be washed, gently rubbing it with your fingers.
Homemade beef sausage is supposed to be cooked in casings (pork or beef intestines), which often becomes a stumbling block for those who want to enjoy the delicacy, but do not know how to get this ingredient. Of course, for villagers or friends of a farmer, purchasing casings is not a problem, so these lucky people can cook homemade beef sausage whenever they want. But others can also find a way out of the situation, namely, to purchase a womb via the Internet. Along with sites that offer this product in industrial quantities, there are many that are ready to sell in very small quantities suitable for home use. You can store it in the freezer, or you can cover it with salt and simply place it in the refrigerator. When preparing homemade beef sausage, the casing should be soaked for 15-30 minutes before stuffing.
It is better to prepare homemade beef sausage in large batches: some will be quickly eaten, and some can be put in the freezer and taken out as needed.
It is better to take nitrate salt, at the rate of 17 g per kilogram of meat.
Step-by-step recipe for homemade beef sausage
Ingredients
- Beef pulp – 2.5 kg + –
- Pork – 0.5 kg + –
- Garlic – 4-5 cloves + –
- Salt – 50 g + –
- Lard (to taste) - added as desired + -
Spices (freshly ground) for homemade sausage
- Black pepper – 3-5 g + –
- Coriander – 5 g + –
- Red pepper – 5 g + –
- Nutmeg – 5 g + –
- Dry ginger – 2 kg + –
Add everything
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Remove everything
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Cooking sausage in the oven
- Before we start processing fresh meat, we soak it in salt water. The ratio of water and salt is approximately: 2 tbsp. l. salt (table) per 1.5 liters of water. However, the proportions can be changed depending on your taste preferences and the amount of meat used.
- We wipe the wet beef with a clean, dry towel and begin slicing the beef.
- Cut the raw beef into small cubes (2-3 cm in size).
- Chop the pork and lard even finer.
To make the meat and lard more manageable, freeze them briefly before cutting (keep them in the freezer for 20-30 minutes). This will make them harder and easier to cut. - Mix the chopped ingredients together, season them with chopped garlic (first chop it finely, then pass the garlic pieces through a press).
- Add salt and all kinds of aromatic spices to fresh ground beef.
- We knead the filling with our own hands, after which we turn all the chopped meat into minced meat, turning it in a meat grinder with a large wire rack.
- We wash the casing (regardless of whether it is fresh or salted) under running water. Before the main rinse, the salted intestine should be soaked in water for 10-15 minutes.
- To stuff the minced meat, we use a gut measuring 1-1.5 m. First, remove the knife and grid from the meat grinder, then pull the casing over the nozzle. When stuffing homemade beef sausage, use a special piston; it will be more convenient for them to push the minced meat into the intestine.
Try not to tie the gut until the first portion of beef appears in it. This will protect the womb from excessive accumulation of air. If you still decide to tie the intestine right away, then during the process of stuffing the beef sausage you will have to pierce it (in places where air bubbles form) with a toothpick or a clean thick needle.
We stuff the intestine with minced meat, immediately dividing it into small sausages so that the meat product looks like a skein of sausages. To do this, start forming sausages directly in the casing.
Leave a small gap between the newly baked (small) sausages, then tie these “gaps” with natural cotton thread.
When the intestine is completely filled with minced meat, we tie the end of the intestine with a thick thread and begin baking delicious spicy sausages. At home we will do this in the classic way - in the oven, using special baking dishes.
How to bake spicy beef sausages at home
Place homemade sausages (in a spiral) in a deep baking dish, pierce the natural casing of the deli meat with a toothpick/needle, then grease the surface of the delicious beef sausages with vegetable oil. The aromatic butter will give your favorite product a beautiful glow as soon as the meat is in the oven.
It is very important to pierce the intestine before baking sausages in the oven. If this is not done, then at a high temperature the casing will burst and the sausage compacted into the womb will come out.
- Place homemade sausage in a natural casing in a well-heated oven for 30-35 minutes.
- We bake beef sausages seasoned with aromatic spices at 200°C.
During the baking process, the sausages will release juice; they will need to be basted periodically in the oven. Just open the oven from time to time and pour some of the released juice onto the dried meat surface, so your favorite spicy sausages with garlic will not only acquire a beautiful golden hue, but will also become quite juicy.
When the meat in the intestine is baked, do not rush to remove it from the mold. Let the meat sausages baked in the oven float in their own fat for some time. After that, take your homemade baked goodies out of the oven and serve them hot to the table.
Recipe 2. Homemade beef sausage “Spicy”
This version of homemade beef sausage will delight lovers of hot and spicy foods, and its smell is very pleasant. However, if you don’t like some of the spices, you can replace them with others.
Ingredients
Beef – 3 kg
Lard – 750 g
Oil, preferably olive oil – a third of a glass
Onion - one and a half cups already chopped
Garlic – one small head
Black and white pepper, fennel, ginger, nutmeg, coriander, oregano, etc. – to taste, about 10 tablespoons in total
Sugar – 1 tablespoon
Salt - to taste
Cooking method
Chop the onion and garlic in any way and lightly fry with oil for 3-4 minutes. Cut the meat into pea-sized pieces; it’s even better to chop the lard with a meat grinder or blender, but you can also use a knife. Add spices, salt and sugar to the minced meat, mix thoroughly and place covered in the refrigerator overnight.
In the morning, pass the minced meat through a meat grinder and set it to cool again, then beat the mass with a mixer and after that you can stuff the casing.
You need to stuff it loosely, tying it every now and then, making long sausages. Place the finished product in the refrigerator for another 12 hours, and then grill it, after piercing it in several places with a needle.
Beef sausage
Today I use beef pulp on a sugar bone for my sausage. The piece is quite impressive, weighing approximately 5-5.5 kg. For comparison, there is a matchbox on the table nearby. I added about 1 kg of layers of pork with lard for a more delicate taste. Meat and lard should be washed, and the pulp should be carefully examined for the presence of small bone fragments.
It is believed that if the meat is fresh, it needs to be soaked in salt water for at least a short time. The calculation of water and salt is as follows: 1.5 liters of water - 2 tablespoons of table salt. This point is at your discretion, I missed it.
Pat the meat dry with kitchen paper towel.
Let's start cutting the meat. The size of the pieces of beef meat should be the same as Olivier cubes or a little larger. And the size of pork and lard should be smaller than beef. To quickly cut meat and lard, you can lightly freeze the ingredients. To do this, place the desired piece of meat in the freezer for 20-30 minutes. The meat will become firmer and easier to cut. Combine chopped meat and lard.
Cut the garlic into small pieces or pass through a press.
Add spices, salt, and a lot of garlic to the sausage mince.
Mix the filling.
Since the process of cutting such a quantity of meat is a long process, for quick cooking I passed some of the meat through a meat grinder with a large grid. It is this beef sausage that I will cook in the oven in a step-by-step photo recipe.
Fresh or salted intestines should be washed under running water (salted intestines are first soaked for 10-15 minutes). Nowadays supermarkets sell special kits for Maggi sausages, containing a set of spices and a collagen casing. At first I bought these sets, threw away the spices (because they had a lot of harmful things added to them), but used the casing to make homemade sausages baked in a slow cooker or oven.
Next, to stuff the intestines, it would be optimal to use a special nozzle for filling sausages. I purchased a special attachment for a meat grinder, but previously I used a regular pastry cream syringe or the neck of a plastic bottle.
The intestine needs to be cut to the required length, a convenient size is 1-1.5 meters. Pull the sausage casing over the nozzle and tie the end with a strong thread or just a knot.
You will need to remove the grate and knife from the meat grinder in advance, and to stuff the sausage, use a special piston with which you will help push the chopped beef.
One more point worth paying attention to. Don't stuff the casing too tightly! It is necessary to take into account that the natural shell will certainly shrink during heat treatment, because it is a muscle. You also need to make room for twisting the sausages; they should look like a skein of sausages or small sausages. At the time of stuffing the minced meat, the intestine will need to be pierced with a thick needle or toothpick at the place where air bubbles form. This will ensure that the ground beef is evenly distributed throughout the raw sausage.
Correct the filling with your hands, and when the intestine is full, tie the other edge tightly.
To tie sausages, use natural cotton thread; if the thread is thin, make several folds for strength.
We leave a few meters of homemade sausage for sampling and immediate consumption (no one refuses this delicacy and always asks for more!). We put the remaining snails or spirals in packaging bags and put them in the freezer. Then we use it at the right time for its intended purpose. Frozen sausages for frying do not even need to be defrosted; you can immediately place them in a frying pan, in a boiling broth with spices, or on a baking tray.
Beef sausage should be placed in a baking dish, twisting in a spiral. Make holes with a toothpick, otherwise the shell will burst during baking. Lubricate the surface of the sausages with vegetable oil, so they will acquire a beautiful golden brown crust.
Choose a fairly deep shape, since a lot of juice is released during the preparation of homemade sausages.
Place the sausage in a well-heated oven (not a cold one!) for 30-35 minutes and bake it at 200 degrees. During cooking, periodically open the oven and pour over the released juice, so the homemade beef sausage will not only be beautiful, but also juicy.
The photo shows how much juice is released when frying sausages. I've come across recipes where you need to bake the sausage for a very long time, more than an hour and a half, so that just this juice evaporates. I do not recommend doing this because the beef sausage will become dry. For sausages of medium thickness (the raw diameter of my stuffed sausages is 4 cm) at a sufficiently high temperature, the time specified in the recipe is quite enough.
When the sausages are ready, do not remove them from the mold immediately, let them soak in the released juice so that they become juicier. At this point, you can cut the salad from fresh vegetables and place the cutlery on the table. You probably won’t need to call your household anymore; they will come running to the crazy smells of meat with garlic and spices!
Children might enjoy eating homemade baked beef sausage and mashed potatoes. Well, since most of my family members were on a protein diet at the time of preparing this meat dish, I served beef sausage with tkemali sauce made from green cherry plum, fresh herbs and tomatoes.
Anyuta and her Recipe Notebook wish you bon appetit!
Recipe 7. Homemade dry-cured beef sausage
To prepare homemade dry-cured beef sausage, you need a dryer. Craftsmen make it from old system units and other disused devices; instructions can be found on the Internet.
Ingredients
Beef – 3.5 kg
Lard 1.5 kg
Salt – 90 g
Cognac or brandy – 3 glasses
Spices (nutmeg, black pepper, coriander, etc.) – a total of 15 g
Cooking method
Grind the meat twice in a meat grinder. Cut the lard into small pieces. Mix the minced meat thoroughly, adding cognac, salt and spices and put in the refrigerator for 12 hours.
Stuff the belly loosely. Make sure that no air bubbles remain. Tie the loaves at both ends and hang them in the dryer. In the evening, roll the loaves with a rolling pin and place under pressure in the refrigerator. Place in the dryer again in the morning. Repeat this until the sausage is ready, which is usually about 20 days.
