Homemade Spiced Sausages

Sausages are one of those things that are really easy to make. There is a basic recipe, and then you can add whatever spices you like. But adding more spices means you have to decrease how much salt is in your finished product, because the salt counteracts the spices. And that makes it hard to get the flavor balance right.

You can fix this by making a spice blend that is specifically designed to be used with sausage casings, or with that particular mix of spices. You could even make the recipe with a single type of sausage casing, and just change its spice mix when you want to change the sausage itself.

In fact, I did this once, and it worked pretty well. But I’m not sure I’ll do it again, because (a) making the sausage blend took too long; and (b) now I have no idea what my spice mix actually is.

The secret to making a good sausage is to use very little salt; the sausages won’t be as puffy, but they’ll have a better texture. You can make traditional sausages by following the instructions on the package. But the instructions are often wrong—for instance, you don’t need to use as much oil as they say. And they never say how much spice to add, though you can figure it out from their measurements.

It’s easy enough to follow the conventional recipe if you want to make something like a hot dog. But if you want something milder and more subtle, like a cheddar-cheese sausage, there are lots of ways you can improve it: For example, buy plain sausage and then put your own spices in it. If you start with plain sausage without any spices at all, that’s not really making homemade sausages; it’s just using up a whole package of sausages. Using your own spices is what makes them homemade.

Sausages are not, strictly speaking, sausages. Sausages are made from pork and beef, and they are usually sliced into little rounds or sticks. But sausages can be made from almost anything, including fish or lamb or chicken or duck or venison. And they can be made from just about anything you want to put in them: meat, vegetables, fruit. Most people use salt only to season the sausage before it goes into the smoker, but it is also possible to make “spicy” sausages, which have more than a pinch of salt in them, by adding a few spices to the ground meat.

But some people don’t like spicy sausages. They think they taste too much like jerk food; the spices have too much flavor for the delicate sausage taste.

To make a spicy sausage with less spice than your standard spicy one: Add a mixture of spices that is flavorsome but not very strong; use 1/3 less salt; sometimes add some sugar to balance out the hotness of the chile peppers.

We are used to the idea that salsas and chutneys and relishes should have a certain degree of complexity. We expect them to have a distinct flavor, but we also like them to be simple to make.

To get the complex flavor, you have to combine several ingredients into one thing. To get the simple simplicity, you can make it from just one ingredient. You can buy a spice mix for sausage: garlic powder, onion powder, paprika, chili powder, crushed red pepper flakes and so on. Or you can make your own using a recipe I found in an old cookbook.

Here’s how to do it: In a bowl mix together equal parts ground red pepper and ground cumin. Add one part ground coriander seed, two parts salt and one part each of ground black pepper, dried red peppers and dried oregano leaves. Then add two parts minced or grated fresh ginger root and four parts minced or grated fresh garlic. Mix well and store in an airtight jar.

The spices aren’t hot enough for salsa; they’re for making sausages with a definite spicy flavor. This is using spices as ingredients rather than as decorations.

Spices are one of the things that help make food taste good. The problem is that spices are potent, and different kinds of spice are different chemicals. A sausage made with the right amount of the right kind of spice can be delicious; a sausage made with too much spice or the wrong kind can be disgusting.

Taste is a subjective thing, but we do have some objective measures: how hot it makes you feel and how much it costs you in stomach acid. Many people want to know how much each spice adds to a dish, but in fact there is no straightforward way to compute it. For example, if you add one teaspoon of cumin seeds to eight pounds of ground beef, they will release at most 0.31 ounces of cumin seed oil (as much as six teaspoons), and you won’t be able to taste it. And that’s just for one spice!

In general a tablespoon of spices will change the flavor of about 1/4 pound of food. So if you go by strength alone, the mightiest spice will only be 6% more powerful than the weakest one.

In practice it doesn’t work quite that way. The best way to think about spices is not so much by strength but by what we call “pungency

Sausages vary in taste, depending on the exact spices used in their preparation. There is no standard recipe; what you use depends on personal taste. So if you want to make sausage that tastes good, you need to make it from scratch.

You can’t buy sausages with a known recipe, or with a standard of quality. You can’t even buy sausages with a standard of flavor.

If you want to make sausage at home, the best thing to do is to start from scratch and see where it takes you.

The basic ingredients are meat, fat and spices. The spice level will be determined by your personal taste.

The first step is to choose your meat: beef, pork or veal. Then choose your fat; often it will be pork fat (known as lard), but sometimes beef fat or butter will work too. The next step is to decide what sort of spices you will use: usually coriander, mixed spices such as cinnamon and nutmeg, salt and pepper, sage and thyme mix well together; sometimes garlic or bay leaves are added too.

If you are a chef, and you want to master sausage making, you want to learn about spices–and not just the way to season sausage. The book suggests that you learn to make your own fresh sausages, and as they get better, use them as an experimental testbed for new recipes.

It’s easy to imagine that this is a book for people who already know enough about sausages and spices to cook them right. But it isn’t. It’s a book for people who can’t cook but haven’t given up on the idea that they might ever learn how.

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