Homemade dry-cured sausage - preparing homemade sausage without casing.

Prepare it with your own hands and feel the significant difference between the aromatic dry-cured sausage prepared at home and the store-bought sausage that you bought until now.

The convenience of my two recipes also lies in the fact that you don’t need to use intestines to form sausage loaves, because... We make sausages without casing.

How to make homemade dry-cured sausage without casing.

Recipe No. 1

For the first option for preparing homemade sausage, beef meat is used, marinated as for biltong. For those who don’t know, this is dried marinated meat.

So, I marinate beef meat (preferably tenderloin) in a cold place for 12 hours, as for biltong (for the proportions of meat and spices, see the recipe “Biltong at home, South African style»).

Then, when the meat is sufficiently marinated, you need to cut it into pieces so that it is convenient to grind the beef in a meat grinder.

Pass the marinated meat through a meat grinder (medium grill).

To prepare the sausage, we will need to cut a piece of salted lard into very small cubes. The optimal ratio of lard in sausage is one part lard to five parts meat.

A prerequisite is that the lard must be finely chopped with a sharp knife, and not processed in a meat grinder or blender. If you grind the bacon to prepare such sausage in a meat grinder, you will end up with just an unsightly fatty substance. By adding this mass to sausage mince, you simply will not be able to form a normal sausage loaf.

We will cut the lard in several stages. At the first stage, you need to cut a piece of lard as thin as possible and put it in the freezer.

When the lard is sufficiently frozen, we can easily cut it first into long thin strips, and then the strips of bacon must be chopped into very small cubes.

The ideal size of the cubes is 0.2x0.2x0.2 cm, but if out of habit you get larger ones, it’s okay, the main thing is not to exceed the size of the cubes 0.3x0.3x0.3 cm. And also, try to cut the lard faster before it melts , or remove the bacon from the freezer in parts as you cut it.

There is another way to cut lard, I won’t say that it is simpler, but to some it may seem faster than the method of freezing the lard.

Take a whole piece of lard (necessarily chilled), make cross-shaped cuts on one side of the lard, and then, along these cuts, chop the piece of lard into cubes.

After the lard is chopped, you need to combine it with the minced meat and carefully, but carefully, without crushing, mix the two components of the sausage.

Well, now it’s time to form our sausage loaves.And now I’ll tell you a little secret about how to form sausages without a casing.

Nowadays, many housewives prepare sushi rolls at home using a bamboo mat (makisu). But, if you don’t prepare rolls at home, you can use any small mat to form dry-cured sausage.

And so, the mat (to keep it clean) needs to be wrapped in 3-4 layers of cling film.

Then, put the sausage mince on the makisa and form the sausages using a mat. What shape to make the sausage - decide for yourself. I make both round and rectangular loaves. You can also make the thickness of the sausage as you wish. The only thing to keep in mind is that thicker sausage loaves will take longer to dry, but they look much more attractive on sandwiches.

When the sausage loaves are formed, they need to be transferred to any stainless steel rack you have and the sausages should be placed in a cool, ventilated place to dry for 48–72 hours (you can simply place them on a windowsill).

When you see that they are covered with a hard crust, you can further dry them by tying them with twine in a suspended state. The ripening period of homemade dry-cured sausage depends on the thickness of the formed sausage loaves. This usually takes another 48 to 96 hours.

When the delicious homemade sausage is ready, to make it easier to cut, you need to place the sausage loaf in the refrigerator for a while before serving.

Such dry-cured sausage must be stored under the same conditions as the meat from the recipe that I have already mentioned several times.

Recipe No. 2

This option will allow you to prepare aromatic dry-cured sausage with the addition of fennel and paprika.

To prepare dry-cured sausage according to the second option, you need to salt good quality fresh beef meat using the dry salting method as for "Basturma" recipe, but only a different amount of table salt is put into dry-cured sausage - 30 grams per kilogram of beef.

Then, the salted meat should be generously sprinkled with paprika, black pepper and fennel and in this form placed in a cold place to salt for 48-72 hours.

We pass the salted meat together with spices through a meat grinder. Cut the lard for the sausage as in recipe version No. 1.

Next, everything needs to be done in the same way as described above.

Dried sausage prepared according to these homemade recipes makes very beautiful and tasty sandwiches, it looks great in cold cuts, and I also use it as a pizza topping.

See also video: Dried sausage without casing at home

Dried smoked sausage.