beer + sausage = beersausage?

Sliced fresh beer ham with some tomato

What goes best with sausages? Right, beer. Is that maybe the reason why there is a German sausage called Beer sausage? I don’t know, but honestly, I don’t really care either. Damn it’s just the perfect combination and for that I have been busy today with my sausage making experiment number 2, “DIE BIERWURST”. Ok I got to admit I took a shortcut and based this recipe onto a similar boiled sausage called the lyoner (and I guess that one originated in France, Lyon), but the principle of both sausages is similar. Like always, I added a few more things to make the sausage more to my taste but basically it all tastes damn good with a cold wheat beer in the evening (some say in the morning it’s equally good – haha). So without further delay, here is my beer sausage recipe (with a little help from some friends).



Ingredients:

• 400 g beef
• 300 g pork
• 300 g non treated pork speck, belly or back speck, both is fine
• 18 g curing salt
• 3 g pepper
• 1 g nutmeg
• 1 g coriander powder
• 0,8 g garlic powder
• 10 g mustard grains
• 2 g ascorbic acid
• 6 g cutter aid / baking powder (the one that contains phosphate)
• 100 g crushed ice
• 150 g crushed walnuts
• 4 bell peppers
• 1 onion

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.

Peel and grind walnuts to small pieces

Cut the meat in cubes

season it with the spice mix

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.

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 walnut / paprika / onion mix

Now, normally, you have some sausage skins (natural or artificial is both good. I don’t have. You can also work with some other aides but I don’t have this either. So I got inventive and I was working with a baking tray and aluminum foil. I put some aluminum foil in the tray form (best to have a round one – I didn’t) and then I add the sausage mixture until nearly full.

Then I take this out, close the edges and wrap everything tightly together. Add some pressure to press everything in form, but attention, don’t put too much pressure or the foil will tear and the mixture will come out.

Now you have to heat up some water to 80 degrees Celsius. Add the sausage to the water and make sure it’s completely covered with water, then boil it at stable 80 degrees Celsius slowly for ca. 120 minutes

or if you have a meat thermometer, you want to cook everything slowly until the core of the sausage reached 80 degrees Celsius as well.

Wrap it out when its cold. Cut a slice of beer sausage and bread (add some gherkins or tomato to go with it, pour a cold beer and enjoy ;)