Cured Sausage Specialty Sausage 102: Making Lebanon Bologna

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Cutting Meat Grinding Meat Stuffing Lebanon What Is Lebanon Bologna?

Lebanon Bologna was originally made by the Pennsylvania Dutch in the 1800’s. Traditionally it is a dark bologna, similar to salami in appearance and texture and it has a tangy flavor. It is often eaten as cold cuts and it can be slow cured and cold smoked or smoked using more modern methods. We are going to be making a version today that will not be slow cured or cold smoked as that makes it more difficult for the average home user.

Meat Block

7 lb of Untrimmed Pork Butts
3 lb of Lean Beef
1 Bag of Lebanon Bologna Seasoning
1 10 lb Capacity Bologna Casing
1 Bag of Sure Gel
Sodium Erythorbate

Equipment

Weston #12 Butcher Series Grinder
Walton’s 11 lb Sausage Stuffer
Weston 20 lb Meat Mixer

Process

If you can you should cut the fat off of your pork and grind your pork fat separately through a 3/16th plate twice. Then grind your beef and lean pork through a 3/8 plate and then through a 1/8 plate. Keep ground pork fat separate. Making sure EVERYTHING but especially your pork fat is cold before you grind it is very important here for particle definition.

Meat Mixing

Place lean meat in the mixer. While mixing add Lebanon Bologna seasoning, Sure Cure and Ice Cold Water. Mix for 5 minutes. Add ground fat trim, sodium erythorbate and mix for 3 more minutes. Lastly, if you are using Encapsulated Citric Acid add it during the last 60 seconds of mixing. If you add the Encapsulated Citric Acid too soon you could break the encapsulation and release the acid into the meat too soon.

Sausage Stuffing

Stuff your meat into fibrous casings that have been soaked for at least an hour in water that is 80 - 100° so the casings are pliable. These casings are tough and durable so don’t worry about blowouts just stuff them fully but make sure to leave enough room to get a hog ring on the open end. When stuffing larger diameter casings it is important to choose the largest of the stuffing tubes that your casing will fit over and make sure you are gripping it nice and tight, we want these casings packed nice and solid.

Note

You can also use Fibrous or Non-Edible Collagen casings, we chose this as it had the capacity we wanted and it presented the product well.

Thermal Processing & Smoking

To smoke start them out with 125 for 1 hour, then 140 for 1 hour then 165 for an hour and finally at 180 until the internal temperature reaches 155°.

Cooling

Place it in an ice bath or shower for 20 minutes to bring the temperature back down and then hold at room temperature for 2 hours and then move to a cooler or freezer before vacuum packing. I let this sit in a refrigerator overnight before slicing to make sure the temperature was brought all the way down.

Wrap up

All in all, this is very similar to making a salami or even a summer sausage, the main differences are separating out the pork fat from your lean and using the correct ratio, seasoning, and casings. The fried Bologna sandwiches were very good!

Additional Tips Removing the fat cap before you break down your pork butt is easier sometimes, it all depends on how it looks before you start cutting into it. I put very little smoke on this as I didn’t want that to dominate the taste so I filled my smoke tray about 1/4 of the way full. I am glad I did it this way as it allowed for the Lebanon taste to come through more. Other Notes

I added X-Tra Hot Red Pepper to this to help give it a nice zip and to cut some of the sweetness. I used it at a ratio of 3 oz per 100 lb of meat and since I was doing 10 lb that means I used .3 of an oz.

Watch WaltonsTV: Specialty Sausage 102: Making Lebanon Bologna Shop waltonsinc.com for Cured Sausage Seasoning Shop waltonsinc.com for Meat Grinders Shop waltonsinc.com for High-Temp Cheese

Specialty Sausage Specialty Sausage: 104 Blood Sausage

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Blending Blood Sauté Onions Mix Ingredients Tie Knot in Casing Tie Between Links What is Blood Sausage?

Blood Sausages have been around for 1,000s of years all over the world. It is commonly mixed with a grain or other coagulant to thicken the blood then stuffed into a casing and either cooked or dried. It is called blood pudding in the UK, Blutworst in Germany, Boudin Noir in France almost every country has it’s own name for it and they can differ slightly or wildly but they all share blood as a main ingredient. Now, we might have already lost some of you as soon as we started talking about blood but don’t be put off by that, when properly prepared it can be delicious and perfectly safe!

Meat Block

3 lb of Pork Butts
1/2 lb of Pork Fat
2 Cups Diced Onion
Pork Blood
2.5 oz Swiss Style Bratwurst Seasoning
1 oz of Carrot Fiber
1/4 oz of Sure Cure

Equipment

Weston #12 Butcher Series Grinder
Walton’s 11 lb Sausage Stuffer
20 lb Meat Mixer

Prep & Grind

Just to make sure everything will be ready when you need it go ahead and soak your natural hog casings in hot water so they will be ready later.

Now, it is always important to make sure everything is kept cold when making sausage but it is especially important here. So we are putting our grinder head assembly, plates and knives in the freezer before we do our grinding here. We will go first through a 3/8 plate and then a 3/16 plate and we will add our pork fat during the second grind. Now put this meat in the fridge for now.

Dice your onions very finely and caramelize them in some of the extra pork fat if you have any left over, or if you don’t just some vegetable oil.

Meat Mixing

Next, in a clean bowl add the onions, meat, seasoning, cure, half the carrot fiber and start adding blood, about a pint at a time and start mixing. Keep adding blood and carrot fiber until you have achieved the desired consistency. It will be a thick slurry but still liquidy. If this has taken you more than few minutes I would recommend you put this mixture in the freezer for a few minutes.

Sausage Stuffing

Now load your stuffer with the mix and load on your natural casings. You want to be careful here and slowly crank the handle so that the mixture comes almost to the end of the stuffing tube and then you want to tie off the end of your casing. Now stuff carefully, you do not want any blowouts here, remember an understuffed casing can be twisted a few more times to firm it up if necessary but there is nothing to be done about a blowout. Now, we are going to twist and tie off each casing so that everything stays where it needs to be during the cooking process.

Thermal Processing & Smoking

And the thing we are going to do to cook these is to poach them in 170° water for 15-20 minutes to firm them up. We are just using our Vacmaster SV1 cooker for this but you can use a pot of water, just make sure that you do not get the water too hot, 170 is about as high as we want to go.

Now remove them from the water and smoke them at 180° until the internal temperature is 160°, or you can add them to soups or other dishes.

Additional Tips As always make sure you keep your meat as cold as you can before grinding. This not only helps speed the grinding process but also helps with food safety which is especially important here if you are going to try to flatten it out. The Blood may be coagulated and hard to mix with other Ingredients. We Decided to pulse the Blood in a Blend just a few times and that helped out a lot, as the Blood became liquid again. Watch WaltonsTV: Specialty Sausage 104: Blood Sausage Shop waltonsinc.com for Weston Pro Series Blender Shop waltonsinc.com for Natural Hog Casings Shop waltonsinc.com for Sausage Stuffers

Specialty Sausage Specialty Sausage: 201 Swedish Potato Sausage

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Grinding Fries Mixing Meat Stuffing Linking Natural Casing 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 brown but you do want to make sure it is frozen solidly.

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 Sedish Potato Seasoning
1.6 oz of Carrot Fiber
0.44 oz of Sure Cure
5.3 oz Water

Equipment

Weston #12 Butcher Series 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 then 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 grinding 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, 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 casing 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. 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 sausage 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.

Watch WaltonsTV: Specialty Sausage: 201 Swedish Potato Sausage Shop waltonsinc.com for Clear Collagen Casings Shop waltonsinc.com for Natural Hog Casings Shop waltonsinc.com for Sausage Stuffers

Cured Sausage Specialty Sausage 103: Making Landjaeger

Attend this entry-level class from Meatgistics University by watching the video, reading the article and post any questions you have!

Breaking Down Beef Flushing Natural Casings Grinding Meat Protein Extraction Flatenning Out Sausage What is Landjaeger?

Landjaeger is a German sausage that is made from a combination of beef and pork. It is stuffed into natural casings and can be smoked and semi-dried or just smoked. Before smoking, it will be pressed either flat or formed with a mold to give it its classic flattened look.

Meat Block

6 lb of Untrimmed Pork Butts
4 lb of Lean Beef
1 Bag of Landjaeger
1 Bag of Sure Gel
1 Bag of Encapsulated Citric Acid
1 oz of Sure Cure (Included with purchase)

Equipment

Weston #12 Butcher Series Grinder
Walton’s 11 lb Sausage Stuffer
20 lb Meat Mixer

Process

Landjaeger needs to be stuffed into a natural hog casing for it to really be an authentic landjaeger and we also want to press and form it so natural hog is the best choice. I’m using a home pack of hog casings so they need to have the salt rinsed off of the casings, then the insides need to be flushed with running water and then let them soak for an hour in warm water.

We need to cut up our beef and pork into pieces that a grinder will easily handle. The smaller the grinder you are using the smaller you will need to cut up your product. With something like this Weston #12 Butcher Series, we want to cut our product into chunks between 2 and 3 inches.

I have had our meat in the freezer for about 45 minutes before to make it ice cold, cold meat will always grind better than warm meat. We will we are going to grind the beef once through a 3/16th plate, before we started we made sure our plates and knives were well oiled to prevent any friction between the plate and knife, this would cause the plate to heat up and it would add unnecessary wear and tear on our equipment. Then we will grind the pork twice, first through a 3/16th-inch plate to break down the meat and then through a 1/8 plate to finish it off.

Meat Mixing

We are going to smoke this so we need to get good protein extraction when mixing. Place in a mixer with water, seasoning, and cure and mix until you have achieved protein extraction. Remember to mix it an even amount of time forward and reverse, about 8 minutes should do it. Remember if you are using Encapsulated Citric Acid like we are that it needs to be added during the last 60 seconds of mixing or you run the risk of breaking the encapsulation.

Sausage Stuffing

Before you load your stuffer you should oil your piston gasket with White Oil to make sure it moves smoothly along the walls of the canister. Load your stuffer, being careful not to create any air pockets in the canister and stuff it somewhat loosely into the casings, you will want to stuff them loosely so you can form them before smoking.

Thermal Processing & Smoking

Lay them out on screens in a smoker and cook with no smoke at 120° for 30 minutes, then 140° for 1 hour, again with no smoke at this stage and dampers still wide open, then at 145° with smoke for an hour and finally 180° until internal temp reaches 160°. The smoking process is a lot easier with something like the Grilleye Pro Plus thermometer that can track your temperature and alert you when you have reached your desired temps. Adding a water pan is a good idea to help add some moisture to the smoker.

Cooling

Once you are done smoking them leave them out for an hour at room temperature to allow them to cool and then place them in a fridge for 24 hours before vacuum packing.

Wrap up

All in all the largest difficulty we faced was flattening the Landjaeger out. Other than that it was really very similar to making any other cured sausage. Adding more water might have made the flattening the meat out easier and allow it to hold it’s shape better, if we do this again we will try that.

I would also either use less Encapsulated Citric Acid as the seasoning appears to have some tang to it by itself. So if you still want to use a cure accelerator I would recommend Smoked Meat Stabilizer or Sodium Erythorbate

Additional Tips As always make sure you keep your meat as cold as you can before grinding. This not only helps speed the grinding process but also helps with food safety which is especially important here if you are going to try to flatten it out. *In the end, flattening out the sausage was the hardest part, getting it between two hard surfaces with a LOT of weight is important. * Other Notes

We also tried to take an extra stuffing tube and flatten the opening with a vice to give us the desired flattened outlook. I was limited in how much I could flatten it out and still be able to get the hog casing over the flattened out portion. Once I stuffed the meat into the casings it immediately took on the shape of the casing so it did not work.

Watch WaltonsTV: Specialty Sausage 103: Landjaeger Shop waltonsinc.com for Cured Sausage Seasoning Shop waltonsinc.com for Meat Grinders Shop waltonsinc.com for Sausage Stuffers Shop waltonsinc.com for Boning Knives

Specialty Sausage Specialty Sausage 101: What is Specialty Sausage?

Attend this entry level class from Meatgistics University by watching the video, reading the article and post any questions you have!

What is Specialty Sausage?

As much as you might love bratwurst, summer sausages and snack sticks sometimes you want a sausage that is a bit more unique. It might be a recipe you tried once in another country, one that your grandparents used to make or something just sounds really exotic like blood sausage. Recipes and knowledge of how to make these types of sausage are often passed down from generation to generation.

For whatever reason, these types of sausages have fallen out of favor and are sadly relegated to the specialty stores of the home processor. Maybe opinions have changed on the type of meat used, the way it is cooked or the seasoning or spices used in the original seasoning. The good thing about this is it gives you the opportunity to “rediscover” plenty of types of amazing sausages.

Types of Meat Required

Sourcing the meat might be a little harder for this than a normal sausage but a quality butcher should easily be able to get you pork liver, trim and even pork blood that you will need to make some of these. Others like Lebanon bologna and some landjaeger only require a mix of pork and beef and a special seasoning.

Casings

Many specialty sausages will also require a special or a specific casing to be used. Braunschweiger has a special plastic casing specifically for the production of that product and others like landjaegar simply require that you use a natural casing like hog or sheep intestine.

Smoking

Smoking and cooking will also be different with a lot of these sausages, a normal smoke schedule might not work for your needs on these products. We will be making Landjaegr, Lebanon Bologna and Blood Sausage in the 10’s and then go for some even more out there products in the advanced classes

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