Fleischkäse - meatloaf

slice of meatloaf on a bread with onions, tomato and an egg

The folks in Germany are divided in their opinion about the name of the following “recipe”, some call it Leberkäse, some call it Fleischkäse. Fact is, this meatloaf recipe does not need any liver, as the name Leberkäse would suggest, in fact, it is not even a normal cooking recipe per se, but together with the author of this blog, you can now go the extra mile and become a traditional sausage maker / butcher, yeah baby, it’s Sausage time.
Don’t be afraid, the recipe is actually easy to make. The most difficult for me was to find curing salt as this item is not sold in China. But thanks to a friend that works in a big hotel in Guangzhou, I got my hand on curing salt. Curing salt is a salt nitrite mixture which helps keep the meat nice and of rose color, don’t use it and your result will come out all grey and sad.
The other things that you need and won’t find in China is cutteraid (I translated this word freely from the word Kuttermittel), which is helping the meat, while putting it through the cutter, to bind the water better and help the emulsification of the fat. But fortunately I found out that I can use baking powder instead of this cutteraid, but it’s going to be baking powder that contains phosphate. I had that as well, so I was very excited and happy to start my project “sausage factory” for some real taste of Germany.

Ingredients:

• 150 g lean beef
• 500 g pork meat (well marbled)
• 200 g non treated pork speck, belly or back speck, both is fine
• 150 g crushed ice

Spice mix fort the meat:

• 20 g curing salt
• 2 ¼ g white crushed pepper
• ½ g nutmeg powder
• ½ g paprika powder
• ¼ g ginger powder
• ¼ g cardamom

The twist:

• 2 bell peppers
• 1 onion
• 2 chilies
• 5 g cutter aid / baking powder (the one that contains phosphate)

 Meatloaf can tuned up according to your taste buds. As we like It spicy (as a frequent reader of my blog you are very familiar with this, I like to prepare my meat loaf with a little twist. For this, I cut the bell pepper, the onion and the chilies in cubes, fry everything in the pan until the onion turn light brown, and let it cool down thereafter

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Now I cut the meat in cubes, season it with the spice mix (see above) and freeze it until everything is nearly deep frozen (the meat should be around 1 degrees Celsius, it should be nice and hard so it can be put more easily through the meat grinder).

- When the meat is cold enough, feed the seasoned meat through the meat grinder to have it mince with the fixed hole plate with the smallest holes.

Now, together with the crushed ice, put the minced meat in the cutter and cut everything so long until you get a real nice and smooth sausage meat mixture, it should have the consistency as in the picture below. Take care that the mixture don’t go over a temperature of 12 degrees Celsius in order to mix the fat and the proteins well together so that the meatloaf won’t lose all the juices later and turn dry. If your cutter is having a hard time to cut the mixture, maybe you want to add a little bit of iced water that I always keep ready for the case. But don’t add too much so the mixture would turn watery…

Thanks to the cutter aid, everything should be nice and sticky, you can feel the mixture between your fingers stick together. Now you can use the cooking method in order to see if everything is consistent and nice. You cook up a small amount of water, then you take one small spoon of your meatloaf mixture and drop it in the water and cook it for ten minutes. If the meat sticks nicely together and the meatball has a good consistency, you already are done by now. This test is also good to check if the seasoning is correct of if something is missing according to your taste buds.

- Now I mixed the mixture with the paprika onion mix. In the meantime I buttered a baking form and then I pour the mixture in the baking form making sure that there are no air bubbles.

Then I shove it in a preheated oven and bake it at 180 degrees Celsius for 12 minutes and 150 degrees Celsius for another 1 hour 20 minutes. These times are rought indications, check that the meatloaf got a golden brown top and is baked through in the middle. If you have a meat thermometer, stick it in the meatloaf and see if in the middle it should be around 70 degrees Celsius.

After you are done, you can garnish your slices of meatloaf with an egg sunny side up, slices of tomatoes, friend onions, mustard, some like to melt cheese over it and it definitely goes very well with potato salad…