Charcuterie_ The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing - Michael Ruhlman [45]
Moreover, while a sausage is prized for its flavor, and is rightfully considered a special item, it requires the least expensive cuts, tough cuts with a lot of connective tissue and plenty of good fat marbled in. Making sausage is a terrifically satisfying way to serve a budget cut of meat.
Food lovers tend to think of sausage as ground meat in a casing, but lots of traditional sausages don’t use a casing. So not having a stuffer or sausage casing is no reason to dismiss sausage recipes. Loukanika, the Greek sausage flavored with spices, herbs, and orange peel, is formed into patties that are grilled, roasted, or sautéed—like American breakfast sausage. Often the loukanika patties are wrapped in caul fat, a fatty membrane from the stomach of pigs and lambs (sausages wrapped in a casing of caul fat—see page 105—are sometimes called crèpinettes, from the French word for caul, crèpine). Mexican chorizo is another freeform sausage, used as an ingredient in various dishes, and Italian sausage is often used loose, its casing removed. Even the more complex of what are technically called emulsified sausages, sausages made of meat and fat processed to a finely textured paste, don’t always require casings. A good bratwurst mixture can be squeezed out of a piping bag straight into hot water and poached, then chilled and kept in the fridge until it’s ready to fry (bratwurst means frying sausage, from braten, to fry). The same technique is often used for religious reasons with veal or beef sausages, for those who want to avoid pork casings.
Sausage usually becomes more special, however, when it’s stuffed into casings, and this type of sausage making can seem like a project in the home kitchen. Once you set yourself up to stuff sausage into casings, though, the capacity for your pleasure and for pleasing others is increased tenfold. They’re fun to make, and the casing itself is a superlative natural cooking vessel. You do need the right equipment and the right ingredients, and you do need to plan ahead. The technique is a multistep process with plenty of cleanup throughout. Clear a good two- to three-hour window for leisurely kitchen work when making sausage.
Even more important than making any sausage properly, however, is cooking it properly. You can make a beautiful sausage but it will be disappointing if you don’t cook it properly. Sausage may be the most commonly overcooked protein in America, after the chicken breast. It is typically either cooked without thought or cooked with fear of not cooking it enough. A sausage with a split casing, all its juices running out, is a badly cooked sausage. A dry sausage is an overcooked sausage.
How to cook a sausage? Cook it the way you would a pricy beef tenderloin or rack of lamb: carefully and to a precise internal temperature.
Most meat sausages have some sort of pork in them (if only just fat). Standard recommendations for cooking pork are that it be cooked to a temperature of 150 degrees F./65 degrees C., for a final temperature of 155 degrees F./68 degrees C. We personally never want to cook a pork chop or loin that far, but for a pork sausage, it’s fine, even prudent, and the sausage remains juicy at that temperature because of its high fat content and because the flavor and juiciness are contained in the casing. For safety reasons, chicken and turkey sausages must be cooked to ten degrees higher, for a final temperature of 165 degrees F./73 degrees C. degrees. Unfortunately, most people it seems cook sausages past 200 degrees F./93 degrees C., until they’re grainy and dry inside. Indeed, when you’ve eaten a truly great sausage, its greatness may well have been the result not of the meat or the seasonings but of proper cooking.
So sauté, roast, grill, or poach your sausage and check it using an instant-read thermometer. Remove the sausage when the internal temperature reads five degrees