Specialty Sausage Weisswurst Sausage Grinding Fries Mixing Meat Weisswurst Sausage Natural Casing What is Weisswurst?

Weisswurst Sausage, or “white sausage,” is a Bavarian sausage usually partially made from some veal and pork bacon. Seasonings can vary, but lemon, onion, and parsley are traditional. Must be cooked in water to avoid a Maillard reaction or charring. We chose to sous vide our sausage. This also helps with keeping the conventional white color. This sausage is full of flavor but does offer an excellent base if wanting to experiment with other flavors. Of course, serving with mustard is a MUST!

Meat Block

30% lb of Pork Shoulder
70% lb of Rose Veal
Weisswurst Seasoning
12 oz Ice Water
2 oz of Cold Phosphate per 25 lb of meat

Equipment

Walton’s #22 Meat Grinder
Walton’s One Shot Grinder Head
Walton’s 30 lb Electric Sausage Stuffer

Prep & Grind

Cut your meat up into chunks small enough to fit down the throat of your grinder. We used a Walton’s #22 and the Walton’s One-Shot Grinder Head attachment. This replaces the entire head assembly of your grinder and can take you from whole muscle to second grind 1/8" plate meat that would be ready for snack sticks, summer sausage, or any cured sausage. Even though this is a fresh sausage, we still want to run it through a 1/8" plate at least. Weisswurst is supposed to have a hotdog-like texture, so it needs to be broken down thoroughly. If you have access to one, a bowl chopper or a mincer can be used to achieve the desired level of emulsification. If you do use a chopper or mincer, you need to add ice water to keep the meat cold.

Additives & Meat Mixing

This is a special fresh sausage, so we want to be careful with the additives we are using. Weisswurst is supposed to be a white-colored sausage even after it has been cooked, so we do not want to add anything that could change that color. We added 2 oz of Cold Phosphate directly to our water and stirred it until it was totally dissolved. The phosphate is going to increase the pH of the meat, which increases the water-holding capacity of the meat. We then will add the seasoning and the water to the meat and mix it until we are just shy of full protein extraction. Remember, we want a smoother texture than a normal fresh sausage here.

Sausage Stuffing

We are using 30mm Fresh Collagen for this, which I would highly recommend. The reason for this is that we are going to cook these in hot water and then peel the casing off the sausage before serving, and the collagen will naturally want to peel off the sausage when it is cooked in water. We used our new 30 lb Electric Sausage Stuffer for these, and even with the reduced water content, the stuffer worked wonderfully.

Appearance

Weisswurst is supposed to be a white sausage after it is cooked, so we have a limited number of ways we can prepare it. We cannot grill or overheat it as we will create a Maillard reaction, and we can’t smoke it as we might have too much smoke adhesion. So, the best way we know how to do this is with a Sous Vide cooker.

Cook in Water

Set a sous vide cooker or stabilize a pot of water at 180° and cook until the internal temp is 160°. A good rule of thumb is 1 minute of cook time for every millimeter of diameter. Now, there are two schools of thought on an ice bath here. Some say to bring it to the table in the hot water, and some want the ice bath. We did not use an ice bath, and the casing peels much easier when the sausage was still hot, but do with that information what you will; there is no wrong answer here.

Serving

Bring to the table and serve hot with some Tangy Mustard; a Bavarian pretzel goes VERY well with them. Remember, this is supposed to be eaten before the noon bell, so eat up!

Watch Walton’s: Specialty Sausage: 202 Weisswurst Shop waltonsinc.com for Fresh Collagen Casings Shop waltonsinc.com for Weisswurst Seasoning Shop waltonsinc.com for Sausage Stuffers

Specialty Sausage Specialty Sausage (What Is It?) 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 that 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 these 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 specific casing to be used. Braunschweiger has a special plastic casing specifically for the production of that product, and others like landjaeger 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 Landjaeger, Lebanon Bologna, and Blood Sausage in the 10s and then go for some even more out there products in the advanced classes.

Shop waltonsinc.com for Jerky Seasonings Shop waltonsinc.com for Vertical Smokers

Cured Sausage Lebanon Bologna Recipe Cutting Meat Grinding Meat Stuffing Lebanon What Is Lebanon Bologna?

Lebanon Bologna was originally made by the Pennsylvania Dutch in the 1800s. 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

Walton’s #12 Meat Grinder
Walton’s 11 lb Sausage Stuffer
Walton’s 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 and 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 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 at 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 in an ice bath or shower for 20 minutes to bring the temperature back down and then hold at room temperature for 2 hours, then move to a cooler or freezer before vacuum packing. I let this sit in a refrigerator overnight before slicing it 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 Blood Sausage (Boudin Noir) Recipe Blending Blood Sauté Onions Mix Ingredients Tie Knot in Casing Tie Between Links What is Blood Sausage (Boudin Noir)?

Blood Sausages have been around for 1,000s of years all over the world. They are 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, and Boudin Noir in France. Almost every country has its own name for it, and they can differ slightly or wildly, but they all share blood as the 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

Walton’s #12 Meat 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. 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 use some vegetable oil.

Meat Mixing

Next, in a clean bowl, add the onions, meat, seasoning, cure, half of 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 liquid. If this has taken you more than a 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 up 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 Walton’s #32 Meat Grinder Shop waltonsinc.com for Natural Hog Casings Shop waltonsinc.com for Sausage Stuffers

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

Cured Sausage Landjaeger Sausage Recipe 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
6 tbsp + 2 tsp (2.4 oz / 67.8 g) of Sure Gel
4 tbsp (1.6 oz / 45.2 g) of Encapsulated Citric Acid
2 1/2 tsp (.4 oz / 10 g) of Sure Cure (Included with purchase)

Equipment

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

Process

Landjaeger needs to be stuffed into a natural hog casing for it to really be an authentic landjaeger sausage, 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 them, 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 Walton’s #12 Meat Grinder, 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 to make it ice cold; cold meat will always grind better than warm meat. 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, 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 sausage 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 also a good idea to help add some moisture to the smoker.

Cooling

Once you are done smoking, 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 flattening the meat out easier and allowed it to hold its shape better; if we do this again, we will try that.

I would also 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 up 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 look. 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