A really great sausage is not as common as you might think.

I have a vested interest in saying this because I’m in the sausage-making business, but it’s the truth.  A lot of the sausages that I eat have dry, mealy, sometimes even crumbly textures.

The primary goal of my sausage-making classes is to teach people that these are not matters of personal taste, but objective flaws in a sausage, plain and simple.  A sausage should have the well-bound fat content that makes it decadently moist in your mouth.  If there is any sense of abrasion on your tongue from dry, crumbly meat, the sausage was not properly made.

I’ve identified what I believe are the three most common roots … Continue reading.

After this year’s Eat Alberta conference, I had a few people ask me about giving some kind of “advanced” sausage-making class.  I wouldn’t consider myself an expert sausagemaker, but at Nomad I got to make them almost every week, so I picked up lots of tricks.  I thought I’d compile some of those ideas in this post.

The following are notes on refining ingredients and techniques to better tailor your sausages to your liking.

Ingredients: The Meat and Fat

Every book on sausage-making says pretty much the same thing: use shoulder.  Maybe jowl, maybe belly, and maybe a bit of trim from around the carcass, but shoulder is the undisputed sausage-making cut.  The reasons are this:

• it generally contains

Reading the ingredients list of an industrially-produced sausage can be daunting.  We’ve been trained to mistrust “scientific sounding” ingredients, and there are ongoing discussions about the health risks associated with many common additives.  I don’t wade into that debate too much in this post, partly because I know so little about it, but also because there are few reliable studies on the subject.  The fields of nutrition and health are so tied up with industry that it’s hard to know what to believe.  I’ll leave it for you to decide what ingredients are okay and which are not.  In this post I simply describe the role the additive plays in the sausage-making process.  Interestingly, most them are used to accelerate … Continue reading.