SAUSAGE - HOW TO MAKE IN-HOUSE

Sausage is a work in progress at Franklin Barbecue. Don’t get me wrong: I love sausage and eat a sausage wrap practically every day. But a critic once dinged us (her only complaint) because we don’t make our sausage in-house. Instead, we’ve had someone else make it for us to our recipe. There’s a reason for this. Primarily, it’s that sausage making is very labor-intensive, and we’ve had our hands full dealing with just the day-to-day running of an insanely busy restaurant. But making our own sausage in-house is something I’ve always planned on getting around to (in fact, I’ve been working on it while writing this book).

Sausage doesn’t have the glamour that brisket and ribs do. But here in Central Texas, which was settled early on by German and Czech settlers with rich sausage-making traditions, it’s taken very seriously. A lot of people really pride themselves on their sausage, and rightly so. I don’t care how good your brisket and ribs are, when you nail sausage, it’s a thing of beauty. But nailing it isn’t easy, and that’s why it’s been an evolution here at Franklin. That said, I’ve done lots of research, and performed plenty of sausage-making experiments, so I can talk about it a little.

Generally speaking, sausage is an excellent and efficient product of whole-animal butchery—a way to use up the bits and scraps that wouldn’t otherwise get cooked and served (I’m looking at you, intestines). In its purer forms, sausage is just meat and fat that is ground together, seasoned, and stuffed into casings. So why do people get so squeamish about it? Commercial sausage manufacturers—the ones who throw salivary glands, nostrils, and eyeballs into the mix—are the ones to blame. Buy a random hot dog or chorizo and who knows what’s in it? But I digress.

At Franklin Barbecue we take a more old-school approach, which means we treat our sausage as an efficient use of all of our brisket and rib trimmings. We trim quite severely, and to toss that stuff in the trash is basically to throw money away, especially since we use Prime brisket and all-natural heritage pork. Even so, sausage making is a labor-intensive (and consequently costly) endeavor. The trimmings themselves have to be trimmed (separating the lean from the fat), then there’s the tricky task (craft, really) of stuffing and tying off the individual sausages.

Coming up with a sausage recipe isn’t terribly difficult—it’s hard to get wrong, really—but variations in the meats you’re working with can make following an exact recipe a difficult proposition. And because sausage is largely composed of scraps, what you have available to put in it might vary. Having a restaurant that produces a consistent volume of scrap meat makes it easier for me to have a consistent mix. But for home cooks, feel free to play around with your own mixtures and to discover what works best for you. The main things to remember are to include enough fat to ensure that the sausage is juicy inside and not to be bashful with seasonings, as you want the flavors to really pop.

Generally speaking, a good rule to follow for sausage is 70 percent lean, 30 percent fat. At Franklin we get there by mixing about 60 percent Prime-grade brisket, about 10 percent pork (mostly from the pork butt), about 27 percent raw brisket fat, and around 3 percent all-natural beef hearts for depth of meaty flavor. When coming up with your recipe, you must consider both the amount of fat you want to grind into your stuffing and the fat content of your meat. For instance, because we use Prime-grade brisket, I add less pure fat than someone who is using Select. Meat from a heritage pig like a Duroc or Berkshire is going to have more fat than meat from a conventional pig. It’s something you have to judge for yourself.

Seasoning a sausage is a measure of balance. The spices are there to enhance the meat and the savory appeal of each bite. It’s important not to overspice, as you don’t want to drown out the flavor of the meat. When you’re tweaking your recipe at home, season, then break off a small nub of the filling mixture, shape it into a patty, and grill it. Taste the cooked sample for seasoning and add more if you need to.

Sausage Casings

The biggest challenge when it comes to making sausage is finding the perfect casing. I’m a perfectionist, and perfect sausage is an elusive thing. A perfect sausage is one that’s been cooked and looks smooth and glistening on the outside. When you bite into it, your teeth meet a little resistance before the casing breaks with a snappy pop and all that delicious flavor bursts onto your tongue. A great bite of sausage is a textural, flavor, and even aural experience.

How do you get the perfect casing? It’s incredibly hard, because the casing is the one variable in sausage production that we at Franklin Barbecue don’t have full control over. Casings, which are made from hog intestines, are never uniform and tend to have varying dimensions, textures, and lengths. (Note that you can buy synthetic sausage casings—they’re more prevalent, actually—but I always say you should go for the real thing.)

We use a 30- to 32-millimeter-diameter casing made from pretty young hogs. For small batches, you can buy them packed in salt, then rehydrate and clean them in water to get the salt off. (When bought in bulk, sausage casings usually come in a bucket of solution.)

But the real issue is that all of the casings come from commodity pigs. It’s seemingly impossible to get casings that are all natural, made from animals that were well treated and raised cleanly and sustainably. Here, we are filling the casings with all-natural pork, really high-grade beef, and all-natural beef hearts from ethically raised cows, and they could be coming from anywhere—China, Mexico—where we have no inkling of how they were produced. This means that we can’t claim all-natural sausage, because we aren’t at all sure. Almost all pork casings are supplied by DeWied, a big corporation that describes itself on its website as “one of the largest selectors of hog casings worldwide.” That alone suggests that the casings can and probably do come from anywhere, and that DeWied does not have much control over the original animal. It’s a problem for which I still don’t have a solution.

By Aaron Franklin and Jordan Mackay in "Franklin Barbecue : A Meat-Smoking Manifesto", Ten Speed Press (an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group), New York, 2015, excerpts chapter five. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa. 

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