This post is about making emulsified sausages like hot dogs, wieners, and mortadella at home, using a grinder and food processor. Emulsifed sausages are those in which the meat and fat have been so finely comminuted that you can no longer visually distinguish them in the cross-section of the sliced sausages: they have become a completely uniform, homogenous paste.

This is a style of sausage for which several of my trusted recipe sources often get the procedure wrong. The most common error is putting the ground meat and fat in the processor at the same time, and then trying desparately to keep the mixture below 4°C. This is the method employed by, for instance, the hot dog recipes in Charcuterie (Ruhlman, Polcyn) and Bruce Aidells’ Complete Sausage Book (Aidells). This approach is very difficult, because we will necessarily generate heat as we process the meat.

However, if you use the proper technique the mixture can actually warm up dramatically without splitting or compromising food safety, giving us more time in the processor and resulting in a very fine, uniform texture.

Formulae & Ratios

One text that does a very good job of explaining the correct procedure is Garde Manger: The Art and Craft of the Cold Kitchen (Culinary Institute of America). The only issue is they describe the technique as a “5:4:3 Emulsion”, this being the ratio of lean meat to fat to ice in the recipe. This ratio is fine for many styles of emulsified sausage (it makes excellent weisswurst), but it’s definietly not the only possible balance between these components.

5:4:3 – This has a relatively low proportion of meat, and yields a very soft, delicate texture. Like I said, excellent for weisswurst.

3:2:1 – This is has a relatively high proportion of meat and low proportion of water, yielding a firmer texture, like that you would want for hot dogs, wieners, and frankfurters.

2:1:1 – This is somewhere in the middle of the previous two ratios.

A Note on Batch Sizes. Commerical operations have large cutters to perform this process. In home and restaurant kitchens we can use a food processor. However for the ingredients to properly cycle in the bowl during cutting, it is critical to keep batch sizes small. If we put too much product in the bowl, it will not cycle properly, and will possibly over-work the motor. I use a 3 qt Robot Coupe (rather more powerful than most home kitchen processors) and only ever put at most 1 kg of product (total weight of meat and fat and ice).

Procedure

Lean fragmentation. We need to bust up the structure of the meat so we have access to the proteins within, most importantly myosin. In other words, we grind the lean meat. I do a progressive grind with a 1/4″ and then a 1/8″ plate.

Protein Solubilization. Once we have dismantled the lean meat, we need to draw its proteins out into solution. We know from standard sausage-making that this happens best in to presence of salt and water, and within the temperature range of 0 to 4°C. We therefore add the ground lean meat, the salt (regular salt and curing salt if applicable), and half of our total weight of ice to the bowl of our food processor.

Run the processor. As the ice is chopped into the meat, the temperature of the mixture will drop below 0°C, but then slowly start climbing due to the heat generated by the friction of the blades on the meat. Observe the mixture and if necessarsy stop the food processor to scrape down the sides of the bowl. Once the temperature of the mixture reaches 4°C, protein solubilizaiton is complete.

Emulsion. At 4°C we add our pre-ground fat. Continue processing. The temperature of the mixture will continue to rise. This can be alarming, because so much of fresh sausage production stresses that everything be cold, cold, cold. Breathe deeply and trust the process.

Once the mixture reaches 7°C we add the second half of our ice. This drops the temperature back down and buys us more time in the processor. At 7°C we also add our flavourings (spices, garlic, et c), and if applicable our secondary binders (eg. non-fat milk powder). Continue processing until the mixture reaches 12-14°C.

A Note on Stuffing & Cooking. Emulsified sausages made by this process expand during cooking much more than a straight grind fresh sausage. In my first batches I had lots of exploded casings, or forcemeat popping out of the open ends of the casings, making comically phallic sausages. Stuff emulsified forcemeats at a much, much lower tension to account for this expansion. I also keep all the links connected during poaching, only cutting them apart once they have cooled down.