Specialty Sausage
How to Cook Swedish Potato Sausage
Grinding Fries
Mixing Meat
Stuffing
Linking
Natural Casing
Meat Block
5 lb of Pork Shoulder
5 lb of Ground Chuck
1 lb Frozen French Fries (or Frozen Hash Browns or Potatoes)
4.8 oz Swedish Potato Seasoning
1.6 oz of Carrot Fiber
0.44 oz of Sure Cure
5.3 oz Water
Equipment
Walton’s #12 Meat Grinder
Walton’s 11 lb Sausage Stuffer
20 lb Meat Mixer
Prep & Grind
You should grind your french fries through a 1/4 inch plate once, now, if you have a smaller grinder and you can’t get a 1/4" plate, you can use a kidney plate. If you don’t have a Kidney plate, I would recommend you either run the french fries very quickly through a food processor with your coarsest blade set up or chop them by hand into small pieces.
Now, grind both your beef and pork through a 3/16" plate twice, if you measure plates in mm then a 3/16th is a 4.5 mm plate. Make sure all your meat is very cold during the grinding process; this will help speed the process and prevent damage to the proteins.
Additives & Meat Mixing
You will also need 3% of your total product weight in water, and we are adding carrot fiber as well. Since we have 10 lb of meat and 1 potato that makes our “meat block” 11 lb so we are using 5.3 oz of water and 1.6 oz of carrot fiber along with 4.8 oz of seasoning. To do that I divided the weight of the seasoning by 25 as that is the amount of meat that the bag will season and that gives us the amount of seasoning needed per lb. Then I just multiply that by the number of lb of meat I am doing and then convert that into oz if the amount is too small for my scale to measure in pounds.
We will be mixing this by hand since we want to make sure we don’t get protein extraction here, as this is a fresh product. After adding the seasoning, carrot fiber, french fries, and water, we are going to mix just until everything is well mixed in; not only are we trying to make sure the seasoning is well distributed, but also we don’t want large clumps of french fries in our sausage.
Sausage Stuffing
Now stuff them into 30 or 32mm fresh collagen casings or 32/35mm hog casings. The advantage of the hog casings is that we can get a really nice twist on these once they are stuffed. In the video, you can see how after I cut between where I twisted, the casing still holds the sausage mostly closed. The disadvantage to these natural casings is the curve and the fact that I had to soak them in water for an hour prior to stuffing. I used the tubed preflushed variety so it was a little easier but still, all in all, I think collagen is easier to use.
With collagen, we just take it out of the package and put it right onto the stuffing tube and we are good to stuff. The disadvantage here is that after you link them and cut them to separate, the collagen won’t hold the end of the sausages closed much at all. You can improve this by freezing them a little before cutting them, but it will still come mostly open during the cooking process.
Cook How You Like
Once everything is stuffed you can grill, roast or pan fry these right away or vacuum pack for future use. If you are going to vacuum pack them just make sure you freeze them first or the pressure from the vacuum will squash your sausage flattish and it might squeeze some of the meat out of the end of the sausage.
What is Swedish Potato Sausage?
Swedish potato sausage is a fresh sausage that is made with beef and pork, along with potatoes of some sort. It is seasoned with Onions, black pepper, salt, and other spices. We are going to be using Excalibur’s Swedish Potato sausage seasoning. We have 5 lb of pork shoulder, 5lb of ground beef, and we will be using 10% of that weight so 1 lb of frozen french fries. You can also use frozen potatoes or even hash browns, but you do want to make sure it is frozen solidly.
Watch WaltonsTV: Specialty Sausage: 201 Swedish Potato Sausage
Shop waltonsinc.com for Collagen Casings
Shop waltonsinc.com for Natural Hog Casings
Shop waltonsinc.com for Sausage Stuffers