Gluten Free Sausages

The beauty of making your own sausages is being able to have 100% control of what goes in. Many commercial sausages have grains incorporated as binders, extenders etc. This typically brings gluten into the mix. A number of commercial spices also contain gluten (I only learned this recently).

I am fortunate enough not to have a gluten intolerance. Others not so lucky generally don't get to tuck into good old pork sausages (porkies). Hence I decided to make a batch of gluten free porkies for a family lunch the weekend.

Although in all likelihood most if not all of my homemade sausages are gluten free, I was just more aware of not adding any ingredient containing gluten.

The recipe for these was a simple batch of pork trimming cubed and mixed with:

• Salt
• coarse milled black pepper
• Chopped fresh Sage
• minced Garlic fried in a little butter
• Chopped fresh thyme leaves
• Chopped fresh chives

After giving this mix a couple of hours in the fridge for the flavours to infuse, the mix was ground, mixed well (±2 minutes in Kenwood Mixer) with iced water then stuffed and ready to braai and add to the lunch menu. I like to make sausages the day before to allow them to stand in the fridge for flavours to properly blend. I also prefer to cook my garlic a little before adding; this changes the taste completely and removes any pungent garlic undertone.

Freshly stuffed gluten free pork sausages

This was served with a little pot of warm home made sweet jalapeno chilli chutney 

Porkies off the braai

Logo time

Part of improving my charcuterie skills involves the distribution of (mostly the giving away of) the successful products to friends and family. This is part of what makes this an expensive venture but allows you to get critical feedback on what you have right and what you need to improve on.

For me, critical constructive criticism is worth ten times someone just saying "wow, its great" unless of course it is just great.

To this end I decided it is time to create a logo so I hit the drawing board and came up with this:

What do you think?

This is the logo in action (note, date corrected. gosh, how time has flown since my first cured bacon):

Salami

At the same time as making Chorizo, I made a batch of Salami. These I stuffed into artificial casings - the only salami size casings I could find.

When using these casings, soak them for a couple of minutes. I pretty much just wet them for a few seconds as I wasn't sure. This worked fine but soaking is probably better. I must say, these casings were easy to use and worked very well.

Artificial Salami Casings

The recipe I followed for this is a basic Milano salami recipe. I am not sure where this originates so I am not posting it here.

This is a fermented salami in which I used 3% salt for curing and safety along with the required prague powder addition for safety and CHR Hansens Bactoferm TD-66 as a fermenting bacteria and then sprayed on CHR Hansen MOLD-600 to get the good mold growing.

Right or wrong, I added the Bactoferm TD-66 to some distilled water a few minutes before using and to help distribute it evenly through the meat mix. This seemed to work OK.

The Mold-600 I made up in a clean spray bottle with tepid distilled water a couple of ours ahead of using. This was sprayed on when hanging.

I wasnt sure how much to "work" the meat after grinding so in error kept this to a minimum. I have since found I should be almost kneading the meat before hand. Next time I will mix this in the Kenwood mixer as I do with fresh sausages.

Stuffing the casings was easier than I thought. These stuffed really well and were firm with no air pockets at all. I tied them off with a bubble knot. There are some other knots if you google it. You should do a proper knot like one of these to prevent your salami slipping out over time if you hang it from that side. don't forget to prick the casing lots all over with a sterilised needle or sausage pricker.

Salami labelled and hanging

I hung this initially at around 20°C and 90% RH (See the Chorizo post for the temperature ranges and times etc. This was hung together so the same conditions prevailed); then 15°C and 75 to 80% RH

After 48 hours the mold was starting to grow well.

Mold at 48 hours

Within a week there was a really good mold covering. It got even thicker after that.

Mold at 1 week

Over time I carefully checked for any other "bad mold". On a couple of occasions in the early weeks some fluffy mold started. This was wiped off with a cloth and some spirit vinegar and never became a problem. No horrible green or black mold was found. I also increased my air movement inside the chamber with the intermittent running of a fan to help prevent bad mold growth.

The drying rate is as shown in the log below:

On hitting the >35% weight loss mark and being eager to see if I would have the texture problems I found with the Chorizo I sliced open and sampled one of the small Salami.

Salami Sample 1

In these photo's you can see how well the mold continued to grow as the salami cured. The fat distribution and size is also exactly what I was targeting.

The shrinkage around the outside results in a wrinkly skin and when peeling the casing off the meat does tend to stick slightly to the casing.

First slices close up

Results:

Texture: OK. I wouldn't say perfect but a lot better than my Chorizo. This was a relief and somewhat a surprise. The texture certainly doesn't have any of my of my chorizo raw meat texture problems evident. Absolutely no case hardening is happening so the air flow, temp and humidity seem OK. Looking closely at the meat around the fat you can clearly see the error I made of not massaging / mixing the meat up properly before stuffing. Despite having read so much before making this first batch I slipped on this one and only got that clear in my head the next day. I suspect this is causing a lot of my problems. Next time the mixture gets a good mixing before stuffing (much like fresh sausage mixing).

Here is a close up showing hot the meat is more like compressed mince meat rather then typical salami:

Close up of salami

Taste: Well, this is two fold. The salami flavour is great. The black pepper has added a good spicy zing to the meat. The only problem is there is a slight "Oven Cleaner" taste which is left in your mouth. This is definitely not a taste associated with rancidity so I was not worried about that. The smell is also fine from a health perspective, nothing going bad. Reading up on the web there are a number of comments around ammonia being produced - Aaaah light on, this is the taste I am getting. In addition to this, although the mold is not said to impart any flavour; I can definitely taste the mold. This is much like the mold taste when eating a nice Brie or Camembert cheese; not a bad thing but definitely there.

From my exploring on the topic some say the salami just needs to breath a bit to allow the ammonia to dissipate. To help with this I skinned the balance of the salami and hung it back up again for a couple of days (apparently it should breath out in a few minutes - I doubt that so went with a couple of days)

The result of this: 

Better but still not a great taste. I still get a bit of the ammonia flavour coming through and a strong mold flavour. I have now put this in a brown paper bag in my normal fridge to give it a week or so.

Update to come on that result. No great expectations though.

I also found a comment on www.meatsandsausages.com where they say " Salamis with mold will have a distinctive cheesy-moldy flavor " I guess this part is then normal. Its also not an unpleasant flavour like the ammonia.

I am going to continue to let the Salami dry some more. I'll expand here as I go

Lessons learned:

• Mix the meat properly to the right texture before stuffing.
• Don't open the fridge to find one of your ingredients left there (the beef portion) after stuffing and cleaning up. It's a lot of work to de-stuff, combine and re-stuff then clean up all over again!
• Don't do a 4,5kg batch on your first attempt. if it goes wrong as it likely may, its a lot of waste.
• I would like to get less mold growing next time (less of the good mold, while still none of the bad). I'm not sure if this is possible, I shall have to test.
• Don't get disheartened - try again using what you have learned

Absolute final results:

Rather disappointed. I ultimately threw it all away. The taste did improve a bit but not nearly to the point of it being enjoyable. The "oven cleaner" ammonia side dissipated a lot at the end (3 months after stuffing) which is interesting. 

The big one I sliced was the best of the lot. I am not sure the influence of size on taste etc. or if this was just luck. 

I'll try again for sure but need to wait until after the heat of summer and December break.

For interest, final weight loss leveled out at 45% loss. to get this lower I guess I would have to lower the humidity. No real need though.

Scales

Working with weights is far more accurate and repeatable than working with volumes. This especially holds true when curing and adding curing agents in the correct proportions. This is also important when looking for repeatability in the addition of dried herbs and spices into things like a simple fresh country sausage.

Ideally there are 3 size scales worth having in the kitchen

• 0 - 10kg with an accuracy of 50g or better (most would be better*)
  
  
• 0 - 5kg with an accuracy of 10g (also most are better*) 
  
  
• 0 - 100g with an accuracy of 0.1g (most to 0.01g)

*Just because a scale shows a 1g accuracy on the display. this does not necessarily make it accurate to one gram

Out of all of these and unless you are planning on doing somethign large scale, the only one you can get away without is the 10kg scale.

The last on this list is typically marketed as a jewelers scale and this is why you need it:

Prague powder is a blend of sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate chrystals at somewhere around 10% blended in sodium chloride (table salt) which has been coloured pink for safety - if it weren't coloured and you confuse it with table salt you could very easily kill yourself.

With Prague powder (NOTE this is for the one I purchase, different suppliers may have different blends) you are looking at an addition rate of 0.375% of the mass of the meat. Lets say you are curing a half belly slab of bacon at 1,32kg. This will require the addition of 4.875g Prague powder into the cure. you cannot measure this accurately with a 5kg digital kitchen scale.

Jewelers scale with Prague powder

Another mod I have done with one of my 5kg scales to allow me to weigh hanging meat (like Salami) reducing contact with any contaminating surfaces:

Frame to hang salami under scale

Cabanossi

Having last made a batch of cabanossi cured dried sausage two years ago it was time to do this again.

Cabanossi is a very popular South African snack. This is a variant on "Kabanos" which originates from Poland (Kabanosy -plural). It is a cured and dried sausage snack stick which is also smoked and has a wonderful flavour. Anything this rich and fattening must be good.

My first round of doing this involved making a 7kg batch using a Kenwood Chef with a mincing attachment. Although the end result come out well, this process felt like it took all day and the Kenwood got really hot. The mincing feeder (the spiral screw inside the mincer) also kept jamming up with the fat having to be stripped and cleaned and the fat got more mushed than I would have liked even being kept almost frozen. 

As the flavour was so incredible I used the same mix this round. This involves the use of a Crown National Cabanossi batch pack. This includes all the spices, flavours and curing agent (Prague powder). I may make my own spice mix at some point in time but this is so delicious and easy I stuck with it.

Using a large mincer (TK-12 mincer which does 150kg/h) and decent stuffer (5L vertical) makes this a very easy process. As you mince the batch 3 times, don't attempt this with a large batch and small equipment - trust me, lesson learned. The texture was also better this round with more mincing, less mushing.

What I learned

The main reason for this post is to share what I learned and what the process looks like when it looks wrong but is actually OK. When making the first batch I was sure things were going horribly wrong as the colour was a bland white fatty greasy looking mess. I was worried but had nothing to lose to keep going. I am thankful I did. Going through the process below you will see what I mean and how this turns out in the end (worth it)

Ingredients (7.5kg batch)

1.5kg Pork leg trimmings 80/20 (80% meat, 20% fat)

3.5kg Beef trimmings 90/10

2.25kg Pork back fat (Spek)

Crown Cabanossi batch pack to suit

Sheep skin casings

250ml iced water

Method

This is the fun part. Remember, your meat must be extremely cold and kept that way between grinds. Your back fat should be almost frozen. Your mincing equipment must be freezing cold. The Crown guideline is to return your meat to 0°C between mincing.

Pre-mince your beef and pork trimmings through your 8mm plate into a BIG tub.

Separately mince your back fat through a 5mm plate then put it in the freezer until needed (don't however go out to lunch now, you want the fat semi frozen, not completely frozen).

Add your spice batch with your included prague powder to your minced beef and pork trimmings, mix well then mince this mix through your 5mm mincing plate.

Add your pre-minced back fat to this along with the iced water and mix it through. This is what you should have:

Blend before final mincing (its ±40% fat)

You now mince this batch through your 5mm mincing plate. This leaves you with a rather white and horrid looking mix (through the Kenwood it looked like white slop):

Final mix before stuffing

Stuffing, setting, smoking and drying

Its now time to stuff this lot into sheep skin casings:

Cabanossi before colour setting in on curing

After stuffing, put into a closed container in the fridge overnight to help giving the curing agents a chance to get active then into your cold smoker for around 3 hours.

Cold Smoking for 2,5 to 3 hours (Smoked with European Beech)

After smoking, hang in your biltong drying cabinet. It will take about a week to ten days to cure and dry. The colour shall start going pink after a day of drying. This was a huge relief first time round. When done the skin should crack when bitten or bent and the inside should have a wonderful cured texture and not taste "fatty" on your pallet; this is due to the change the fat undergoes during curing.

Colour starting to set in after 24 hours hanging

When drying and curing, keep your temperatures fairly low; not much above 20°C. This gives your sausage time to cure while drying.

Colour changes

On my first round the fat got slightly over worked and made the initial sausage much whiter than this batch. This was scary as I thought I had wasted a huge amount of time and money.

Fortunately this was not the case. The sausage starts pretty white / bland coloured. There is no change over night in the fridge. There is little to no change when cold smoking. The colour only really starts to set in and go pink after approx 24 hours of hanging and drying. The colour improves over the drying process and the lovely dark pinky brown is only there at the end.

Colour change after 1 week

Salt

As the most important ingredient in curing this deserves some attention.

We cant get "Kosher" Salt in South Africa - well at least not the kosher salt available in the USA and referred to extensively as the salt of choice in curing. This led me towards many a session looking into salt to determine what to use etc.

Three key factors I believe are of utmost importance when selecting the salt to use are:

• Naturally made (i.e by nature not in a chemical factory by man)
• The correct crystal size to distribute evenly through your meat
• Knowing how much salt you are adding. 

Naturally made

All salt found in nature has at some time originated from the dissolved salt mineralisation in the oceans. Natural salt can therefore be sourced from producers evaporating sea water to crystallise salt or from rock salt mined. This salt will have been formed into underground salt formations millions of years back after trapped sea water evaporated over time in trapped caverns - or something like that.

I have read opinions on salt produced from the oceans now risking contamination like radiation from Fukushima and other pollutants etc. I have no real opinion on this at this time.

Man made chemical salt (table salt) has a few problems for me - It's unnatural, the crystals are typically too small and there are usually flowing agents, anti-caking agents and often iodine added. I don't want those.

Crystal size

You need to be able to evenly distribute your salt through your meat when making salami, Chorizo, fresh sausage etc. To do this effectively it is easier to have the right size salt crystals. From what I have read this is the main reason Kosher salt is selected for use.

Not being able to purchase Kosher salt locally I started using Maldon see salt (basically a fleur de sel) which I would lightly crush. This distributes well and is a lovely salt. Unfortunately as this is more of a finishing salt it is expensive to use in curing. Solution - I am now using fine ground Himalayan rock salt. This has a chrystal size similar to Kosher salt. It distributes well and I have found this to work very well.

Addition amount

Adding the correct amount of salt is critical to curing. Too little and you can have unnecessary spoilage. Too much and you will have a salty tasting end product.

The amount of salt required is typically calculated as a percentage of the mass of the final meat product. Hence this is a mass (weight) calculation and not a volumetric calculation.

Different salt's have different bulk density's (weight to volume ratio or say the weight of a teaspoon of salt), a gram of salt will add the same amount of saltiness no matter what salt you choose to use. You should therefore ensure you always calculate the salt requirement on mass and not volume.

Different Salt Crystal Sizes

Pink Salt

Prague powder (also known as pink salt) is something completely different. This is a curing agent to help protect against botulism. Although Himalayan rock salt is pink, this is NOT prague powder. Prague powder is a blend of sodium nitrate and sodium nitrite with table salt and pink colouring for safety. This is poisonous in the wrong concentration (the wrong concentration is not very much). As a safety precaution, do not store this where children or other adults can confuse this as a form of table salt and eat it.

Although some people don't believe in using prague powder in curing, my opinion is that I would rather not risk botulism when giving cured meat to family and friends. Botulism kills; I will protect against that. The active ingredients (nitrites and nitrates) occur in natural food sources too so we consume them eating healthy products anyway. Besides these chemicals break down and dissipate over time through the curing process. Common sense and safety.

Pork Sausages One

This last weekend was time to make some more sausages. I followed two recipes this round and then cold smoked half of the second recipe. This is an experiment to see how much smoke flavour I can get into a pork sausage.

BREAKFAST SAUSAGE WITH FRESH GINGER AND SAGE

The first recipe was "BREAKFAST SAUSAGE WITH FRESH GINGER AND SAGE" from the book Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn. see books tab.

Unfortunately I could not find fresh sage and mine has not survived the winter or the puppies so I had to substitute with dried sage. For the rest I followed the recipe closely and must say this is a delicious sausage. I do believe the fresh herb would add another dimension to the flavour - next time.

THYME FLAVOURED SAUSAGE - Half smoked

The second recipe was a simple sausage focusing on a strong thyme flavour. I also cold smoked half this batch.

Ingredients:
3kg 80:20 pork shoulder
1tsp garlic powder
8g white pepper
53g salt (I used fine ground Himalayan rock salt)
3Tbsp Dried Sage
2tsp onion powder
3g dried thyme
300ml iced water

After blending the dry spices with the chopped meat I ground this through the mincer small plate then mixed for about 2 minutes in the electric mixer (Kenwood) adding the water until this was all looking nice and sticky. This was then stuffed into hog casings and linked.

Half this batch was then put into the cold smoker for 2 hours of cold smoke contact. After this the sausages are bagged, tagged and left in the fridge for a day for the smoke and flavours to blend.

The thyme flavour is well pronounced in this sausage. The cold smoke also penetrated well giving this an interesting additional flavour for a fresh sausage. Adding smoke like this to a bacon and cheese sausage would work very well.

The smoke was not a dominant or overpowering flavour but also tamed the thyme somewhat. The cold smoke also didn't make the sausages very rich like I find hot smoking them does.

The texture and flavour here was wonderful and I will definitely add a splash of cold smoke to sausages on occasion going forward.

Cold Smoke Generator

Cold smoking requires little more than a cardboard box and a way to generate cold smoke. The idea is to be able to expose your cured bacon, salmon or other delicacy to smoke without any heat being added.

I have made a couple of different cold smoke generators and having pulled different ideas together would recommend following the sketch below. this allows the most flexibility between free standing or clipping onto the side of you smoker box (you would need a wooden or steel cabinet for this).

As far as materials of construction; Stainless steel is first prize but is expensive. Mild steel is perfectly alright. You can also use copper in the construction. Stay clear of galvanised (Zinc coated) materials for any of it as this can be poisonous.

You need a source of pressurised air connected onto the thin inner tube. The air blowing out the end of the inner pipe causes a venturi suction and pulls air up through your smoldering wood chips and blows the cool smoke out the front.

Having tried both a large compressor at one extreme and a basic fish pond air pump on the other. The fish pond pump is SIGNIFICANTLY better. I was hesitant at first and thought it wouldn't supply enough air flow however in practice still had to slow the pump down as it produced too much air flow.

Another option is a simple T piece on top of the unit out of copper pipe as per the photo below. I used this successfully on some of my units built. You can see the inner pipe on this too. made of thinner copper tube. Don't get too caught up in exact measurements. I have found that anything close to the scale above that looks right is bound to work.

Another basic tin option:

Connection to a compressor is not even effective when throttling the air with a ball valve. You can use a compressor as per the photo below to generate a huge amount of smoke. This is however completely unnecessary and also has the disadvantage that you burn lots of wood chips and generate a huge amount of tannin / creosote which are bitter from the high temperature of the wood burning.

My current setup - based on the operational principle of the diagram at the beginning of this post is as follows with a basic cardboard box smoking cabinet:

Below is a video with the smoke generator running as I use it (fairly well turned down):

You don't need anything fancy as the smoking cabinet although I would like to build something that I can store outdoors to minimise setup and pack up time. here is an earlier smaller box:

Bacon on the go

Here is some added info on the wood chips I use. I use a lot of beech wood chips. they have a nice well balanced smoke flavour. these are what I use:

Here is a link to the GOLDSPAN site where they have some interesting information on humidity etc. in your smoking chamber. I need to play with humidity a bit I think

beech smoking chips

close up showing chip size - perfect

Chicken Liver and Green Olive Pate

This is a very simple and most delicious recipe.

Ingredients

1 Large Onion
500g free range cleaned chicken livers
25 to 30 green olives stoned
250g farm butter
2 plump cloves of garlic crushed
30ml Brandy
Salt (Fleur de sel is my preference for this)
Freshly ground black pepper

Method

Finely chop and fry the onion and garlic in half the butter over a medium heat until soft not browned. Add the chicken livers and fry approximately 5 minutes per side until fully cooked but still slightly pink inside.
Remove the pan from the heat, add the olives, the brandy and balance of the butter. Season well then when the butter has melted, liquidise in a blender until smooth. transfer to your pate dished, smooth off and pour melted butter over to cover.
Refrigerate over night and serve with bread, melba toast, crostini or as you wish.

Ingredients

Fried liver off the heat with olives and butter

Temperature and Humidity Control Problems

This post came about when using a pretty standard curing chamber setup, I found I was having some interesting temperature and humidity control issues. Below describes these issues and how I solved them.

Setup

As a curing chamber I modified a fridge following the general guidelines readily available on the web. My specs are as follows:

• ·      Free standing full fridge unit (no freezer compartment): 360 litre
• ·     Humidifier: ultrasonic
• ·     Fan 150mm 220V electrical case fan (big brother to a standard computer    casing fan)
• ·    Hanging rack – wooden. I will later change this material or paint it.
• ·   Controller: Lilytech^® ZL-7801A. This controller has some nice features in that it can control temperature based on heating (connect it to a heat source) or cooling (connect to fridge power) it also has two other timer switched outputs. One is NC (Normally closed) and the other NO (normally open) on the same circuit so the power effectively toggles between them according to how you set the time. I’ll get to this more later. Setpoint adjustment is also really simple with this unit.Out of interest, this controller seems to be used typically in the chicken egg incubation industry where the additional timers are used to turn the eggs over.

Chamber overview

Control Panel Mount

Components

Controller

Ambient Weather

Some further input to understanding my initial temperature control problem. I live in Johannesburg South Africa. It is mid July (middle of winter) typical temperatures are as follows:

Time of day	Outside temps °C	Inside my garage
Daytime high	Varies 14 to 18	10 to 14
Typical overnight	Around 8 to 10	8 to 10
Morning low (the dip as frost melts)	0 to 3	Slight dip to about 6

Humidity is low averaging around 35%RH

When hanging my first batch of Chorizo and Salami together I put them in the chamber with a heater to control around 20°C with humidity set point 90% for fermentation then connected the controller to the fridge and dropped the humidity set point to 80%.

At this time I noticed significant swings in the humidity and with a little help I added an Arduino based temperature and humidity monitor with a history trend into the fridge. For the history trend this is connected to www.blynk.cc and trends live on the web so I can check what’s happening any time from anywhere on a phone app (really cool).

 

Arduino Temp Humid Monitoring Unit connected through wifi

Problem

Adding the trend I found I hit 100% humidity and even adjusting the set point I could not get it down. I was also getting a significant discrepancy between the Arduino temperature probe (even after upgrading to a DH22 probe) and the controllers probe. I did not have the Arduino probe in an enclosure so may have had dewing on the probe itself adding to this problem.

This led me to digging out dew point charts and I found that for the humidity we are running at and the temperatures we control to, we are typically within a few degrees of dew point. The problem I was experiencing was with the dip in temperatures in the early morning along with my humidifier over shooting the set point due to controller lag I was dropping below my dew point and had no control over this as I am only controlling on cooling. I also did not have a fan in the fridge at this point. Fridge was off however temperature was steadily dropping. Here is a trend of that data:

Solution

Firstly I added a fan to the same power circuit as the humidifier so this will run with the humidifier. I also turned down the humidifier to very low. This made little difference but was necessary for bad mold control anyway (airflow).

Secondly I realised I needed to add a heat source into the fridge to consistently pull the temperature above the set point. This way my controller was in charge and not the ambient temperature. I googled around for ideas on this and the easiest inexpensive solution I found was an incandescent light bulb in a tin (you don’t want too much light in the fridge – so I believe; although I am still trying to verify that). For information, a tin with a 100W light bulb, tin foil top and plastic lid will get so hot that within 5 minutes the lamp fitting and lid will have melted. So, back to the drawing board.

After some more fiddling, I have settled on a 60Watt light bulb mounted on a block of wood, wrapped in tin foil and connected to a dimmer unit to turn this down as low as possible. This has solved my problem and I am now controlling perfectly with great correlation between the two units. Less heat would be preferred but this works (maybe a reptile heating pad is the next option)

 

Foil wrapped light heater (foil top helps to dissipate heat)

Resulting control:

 

6 hour trend

Dip when adding heater on 24 hour trend

A further change I then made to increase the amount of air circulating inside the chamber was to connect the fan to the controller timer and run on a 15 minute on, 15 minute off repeating cycle. I also dropped the temperature and humidity set points. This had the following trend effect:

Temp Set Point Drop and Fan Change

Below is a longer term trend of the chamber with a few tweaks to settings. Note, the spikes can be ignored. These are when opening the door and making other mods to hardware (I also put the Arduino DH22 sensor in a pill box with lots of holes drilled in it to prevent the risk of dewing on the electronics – I figure this is like parking your car under a tree to prevent dew on your windscreen in the morning).

1 Week Trend