Sausages And the Science of Salt
From: J. Kenji López-Alt Managing Culinary Director, The Food Lab, Serious Eats
Truly great sausage is hard to come by.
What do I mean by truly great? Well, first off, it's got to have the right texture. Juicy and fatty, with a nice spring to it and a resilience that I would describe as almost rubbery, if that word didn't already have so many bad connotations. Let's call it... mildly bouncy.
Never made sausage before, you say? Don't worry. By the end of the day, you'll be a pro.
Before we begin, here's a quick pop quiz: What's the most important ingredient in a sausage?
Now, a good portion of you probably cried out, "the meat!" causing co-workers, spouses, and/or pets to wonder exactly what it is you do on that computer all day. That's a good guess, but it's wrong. See, good meat, well, yeah, it's important, but a sausage can be made out of pretty much any type of meat. Pork, duck, turkey, beef, chicken, venison, even fish or scallop. You name it, and if it's got muscles and fat, it can be turned into sausage.
Ah, you've now said to yourself. Fat. That must be it. Better guess, but still not quite right. True, all good sausages have fat in them, and plenty of it. But again, the exact type of fat doesn't matter all that much, so long as it's solid at room temperature and turns juicy and melty when hot. In fact, fat content in sausages can range anywhere from about 20% in a lean Italian fennel or bratwurst, all the way up to nearly 35% for a delicately emulsified boudin blanc or mortadella.
Well then, it's got to be the seasonings. Herbs, spices, aromatics, and whatnot, right? Nope. In fact, the flavorings are probably the least important part of a sausage, because they are almost entirely up to a matter of personal taste. You like garlic with your pork? Go ahead, it won't change the basic structure or science behind making it. Prefer yours with smoked paprika and coriander seeds? That works too. You could flavor your sausage with camel droppings, for all I care. Any changes you make in flavoring are completely superficial.
So what is the most important ingredient in a sausage?
Salt.
That's right. Plain, simple, humble Sodium Chloride. NaCl. Indeed, the word sausage itself comes from the Latin root for salt. In other languages, that meaning is not quite as obfuscated. Salchicha in Spanish, or salciccia in Italian, for instance. Why does salt make such a big difference? Let's take a look.
A Sausage Worth Its Salt
As anyone who's ever tried to make a sausage without salt will tell you, it simple does not work.
See, despite the fact that ground meat looks like, well, ground meat, it's actually got a fairly complex structure. In their whole form, muscle fibers resemble thick bundles of telephone cables, where each individual wire inside the bundle is a single protein. Chop up these cable bundles, like you do when you grind meat, and you end up with a whole bunch of shorter bundles. Shorter, but still intact: the protein strands are still held tightly within.
Even if you mix them thoroughly, kneading the meat like bread dough, you'll only succeed in some very minor cross-linkage between these short proteins. It's just about enough cross-linkage to ruin the texture of a burger, but not enough to create the bouncy, tightly bound texture of a sausage. You end up with something that would win first prize in a worst-of-both-worlds competition.
Salt changes everything.
Here's what's going on inside those chunks of meat after you salt them:
At first, some of these juices are drawn out of the meat through the process of osmosis. That's the tendency for a solution to travel across a permeable membrane in the direction of lower solute concentration to higher concentration (translation: when there's lot of salt outside of the meat and not much inside, water from within the meat will travel out to try and even out the concentration on the outside and the inside). The salt then dissolves in these juices, creating a briny liquid. Certain meat proteins, namely myosin, will partially dissolve in the presence of this brine.
Essentially, the bundles of telephone wires become looser, their ends fraying out. You can see this happening when you let a chunk of salted meat sit. The exterior gets darker and darker as the proteins dissolve. This makes it far easier for the proteins to then cross-link when you knead the ground meat. Indeed, just by feeling salted ground meat vs. regular ground meat, you can instantly tell the difference: the salted meat is much stickier.
In Good Time
What about timing? Does it matter how long you let your salted meat rest for? (T)here's a pretty clear advantage to letting your meat rest before grinding and forming the sausage. A wait of two hours saves you half of the juices that would have been lost, while four hours saves you a full 75%. Not bad. Beyond eight hours or so, the changes become incremental, shaving off a half percentage point or two before finally maxing out at around a 3.6% moisture loss level after a few days of salting.
With salt testing finished, all that's left is to figure out the best way to grind meat. Luckily, this is a topic I've explored in great depth in a previous Burger Lab post, and the results are not all that different for sausage. Here are the basics.
Keep Everything Cold
Aside from proper salting, this is the single most important step in good sausage making. Both the meat and the grinder must be properly chilled before you begin. See, fat and meat both soften as they get warm, and grinding creates an awful lot of friction, meaning that your meat has a tendency to heat up just by the very nature of grinding. Soft meat and fat = poor chopping. Fat smears out of the meat, and you end up with mush instead of fat and meat evenly distributed.
Good chilling will allow the fat to remain properly distributed throughout the meat in little juicy pockets that baste the sausages as they cook, keeping everyone well-juiced and happy.
Grinder, Food Processor, Or By Hand?
I almost exclusively use the meat grinder attachment for grinding meat. It's fast, efficient, inexpensive if you've already got a stand mixer, and produces the best results short of hand-chopping, which is a real pain in the butt.
I've blabbed more than enough about how to properly use a grinder, so I won't repeat it here (just click through that link). Long story short: keep everything cold, store the grinder in the freezer, and grind fast.
If you don't have a meat grinder, a food processor will get the job done as well. Rule numero uno still applies: keep it all cold. In a food processor, you'll want to get your meat even colder. Throwing it in the freezer in a single layer on a tray for fifteen minutes or so helps a lot. So does grinding in small batches.
The Need to Knead
Now, salted ground meat will taste just fine on its own, but to really develop some true snappy sausage texture, you need to knead it. And when I say knead, I mean that literally. It is exactly like kneading dough for a loaf of bread, and the end goal is the same: the development of protein within the mass.
Just as kneading causes proteins in the flour to cross-link with each other forming a strong network that gives your bread structure, so kneading will cause meat proteins to cross-link, creating a strong network that gives your sausage resilience.
You can do your kneading by hand inside a bowl, but if you've already got the stand mixer out for grinding, the easiest thing to do is to grind the meat directly into the bowl of the stand mixer, then immediately beat it with the paddle attachment right after you finish grinding. You'll see it transform from a loose pile of meat to a sticky, cohesive blob within a minute or so.
Flavoring
Remember when I said that flavoring doesn't really matter? Well that's absolutely true. It's completely a matter of personal taste. A plain sausage made with just pork and salt will still be mighty tasty if prepared properly (which, of course, it will be now that you've read this post), just as a fine specimen of a man or woman will look great even in their birthday suit.
But sometimes its nice to add a little something to spice things up a bit. Think of flavorings as sexy underwear for your sausages.
The basic seasonings for what we call "Italian Sausage" are fennel seed, garlic, and black pepper, though I find that a touch of sugar helps bring out the sweetness of the pork. Many recipes call for basil. I prefer the slightly more robust flavor of dried marjoram (not mandatory by any means), and since I like my food hot, I also throw in a bit of red pepper flakes and cayenne into the mix. You can leave this out or add even more if you'd like.
Some recipes have you grind the spices before adding them to the sausage. I prefer to toast mine whole and add them as-is to the meat as it sits in its salt bath overnight. They get crushed as they pass through the grinder along with the meat, giving you plenty of even flavoring without the need to whip out the spice grinder.
Sausages are a never-ending can of worms. I mean, we haven't even begun to talk about complexities such as cooking temperature, cuts of meat, fat content, aging, drying, emulsified sausages, stuffing, smoking, fermenting, or any of the other dozens of ways in which sausages are treated to convert them from awesome-like-a-hot-dog to awesome-like- a-hundred-billion-hot-dogs.
But that's another story for another time.
About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Managing Editor of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.
For full article click here
From: J. Kenji López-Alt Managing Culinary Director, The Food Lab, Serious Eats
Truly great sausage is hard to come by.
What do I mean by truly great? Well, first off, it's got to have the right texture. Juicy and fatty, with a nice spring to it and a resilience that I would describe as almost rubbery, if that word didn't already have so many bad connotations. Let's call it... mildly bouncy.
Never made sausage before, you say? Don't worry. By the end of the day, you'll be a pro.
Before we begin, here's a quick pop quiz: What's the most important ingredient in a sausage?
Now, a good portion of you probably cried out, "the meat!" causing co-workers, spouses, and/or pets to wonder exactly what it is you do on that computer all day. That's a good guess, but it's wrong. See, good meat, well, yeah, it's important, but a sausage can be made out of pretty much any type of meat. Pork, duck, turkey, beef, chicken, venison, even fish or scallop. You name it, and if it's got muscles and fat, it can be turned into sausage.
Ah, you've now said to yourself. Fat. That must be it. Better guess, but still not quite right. True, all good sausages have fat in them, and plenty of it. But again, the exact type of fat doesn't matter all that much, so long as it's solid at room temperature and turns juicy and melty when hot. In fact, fat content in sausages can range anywhere from about 20% in a lean Italian fennel or bratwurst, all the way up to nearly 35% for a delicately emulsified boudin blanc or mortadella.
Well then, it's got to be the seasonings. Herbs, spices, aromatics, and whatnot, right? Nope. In fact, the flavorings are probably the least important part of a sausage, because they are almost entirely up to a matter of personal taste. You like garlic with your pork? Go ahead, it won't change the basic structure or science behind making it. Prefer yours with smoked paprika and coriander seeds? That works too. You could flavor your sausage with camel droppings, for all I care. Any changes you make in flavoring are completely superficial.
So what is the most important ingredient in a sausage?
Salt.
That's right. Plain, simple, humble Sodium Chloride. NaCl. Indeed, the word sausage itself comes from the Latin root for salt. In other languages, that meaning is not quite as obfuscated. Salchicha in Spanish, or salciccia in Italian, for instance. Why does salt make such a big difference? Let's take a look.
A Sausage Worth Its Salt
As anyone who's ever tried to make a sausage without salt will tell you, it simple does not work.
See, despite the fact that ground meat looks like, well, ground meat, it's actually got a fairly complex structure. In their whole form, muscle fibers resemble thick bundles of telephone cables, where each individual wire inside the bundle is a single protein. Chop up these cable bundles, like you do when you grind meat, and you end up with a whole bunch of shorter bundles. Shorter, but still intact: the protein strands are still held tightly within.
Even if you mix them thoroughly, kneading the meat like bread dough, you'll only succeed in some very minor cross-linkage between these short proteins. It's just about enough cross-linkage to ruin the texture of a burger, but not enough to create the bouncy, tightly bound texture of a sausage. You end up with something that would win first prize in a worst-of-both-worlds competition.
Salt changes everything.
Here's what's going on inside those chunks of meat after you salt them:
At first, some of these juices are drawn out of the meat through the process of osmosis. That's the tendency for a solution to travel across a permeable membrane in the direction of lower solute concentration to higher concentration (translation: when there's lot of salt outside of the meat and not much inside, water from within the meat will travel out to try and even out the concentration on the outside and the inside). The salt then dissolves in these juices, creating a briny liquid. Certain meat proteins, namely myosin, will partially dissolve in the presence of this brine.
Essentially, the bundles of telephone wires become looser, their ends fraying out. You can see this happening when you let a chunk of salted meat sit. The exterior gets darker and darker as the proteins dissolve. This makes it far easier for the proteins to then cross-link when you knead the ground meat. Indeed, just by feeling salted ground meat vs. regular ground meat, you can instantly tell the difference: the salted meat is much stickier.
In Good Time
What about timing? Does it matter how long you let your salted meat rest for? (T)here's a pretty clear advantage to letting your meat rest before grinding and forming the sausage. A wait of two hours saves you half of the juices that would have been lost, while four hours saves you a full 75%. Not bad. Beyond eight hours or so, the changes become incremental, shaving off a half percentage point or two before finally maxing out at around a 3.6% moisture loss level after a few days of salting.
With salt testing finished, all that's left is to figure out the best way to grind meat. Luckily, this is a topic I've explored in great depth in a previous Burger Lab post, and the results are not all that different for sausage. Here are the basics.
Keep Everything Cold
Aside from proper salting, this is the single most important step in good sausage making. Both the meat and the grinder must be properly chilled before you begin. See, fat and meat both soften as they get warm, and grinding creates an awful lot of friction, meaning that your meat has a tendency to heat up just by the very nature of grinding. Soft meat and fat = poor chopping. Fat smears out of the meat, and you end up with mush instead of fat and meat evenly distributed.
Good chilling will allow the fat to remain properly distributed throughout the meat in little juicy pockets that baste the sausages as they cook, keeping everyone well-juiced and happy.
Grinder, Food Processor, Or By Hand?
I almost exclusively use the meat grinder attachment for grinding meat. It's fast, efficient, inexpensive if you've already got a stand mixer, and produces the best results short of hand-chopping, which is a real pain in the butt.
I've blabbed more than enough about how to properly use a grinder, so I won't repeat it here (just click through that link). Long story short: keep everything cold, store the grinder in the freezer, and grind fast.
If you don't have a meat grinder, a food processor will get the job done as well. Rule numero uno still applies: keep it all cold. In a food processor, you'll want to get your meat even colder. Throwing it in the freezer in a single layer on a tray for fifteen minutes or so helps a lot. So does grinding in small batches.
The Need to Knead
Now, salted ground meat will taste just fine on its own, but to really develop some true snappy sausage texture, you need to knead it. And when I say knead, I mean that literally. It is exactly like kneading dough for a loaf of bread, and the end goal is the same: the development of protein within the mass.
Just as kneading causes proteins in the flour to cross-link with each other forming a strong network that gives your bread structure, so kneading will cause meat proteins to cross-link, creating a strong network that gives your sausage resilience.
You can do your kneading by hand inside a bowl, but if you've already got the stand mixer out for grinding, the easiest thing to do is to grind the meat directly into the bowl of the stand mixer, then immediately beat it with the paddle attachment right after you finish grinding. You'll see it transform from a loose pile of meat to a sticky, cohesive blob within a minute or so.
Flavoring
Remember when I said that flavoring doesn't really matter? Well that's absolutely true. It's completely a matter of personal taste. A plain sausage made with just pork and salt will still be mighty tasty if prepared properly (which, of course, it will be now that you've read this post), just as a fine specimen of a man or woman will look great even in their birthday suit.
But sometimes its nice to add a little something to spice things up a bit. Think of flavorings as sexy underwear for your sausages.
The basic seasonings for what we call "Italian Sausage" are fennel seed, garlic, and black pepper, though I find that a touch of sugar helps bring out the sweetness of the pork. Many recipes call for basil. I prefer the slightly more robust flavor of dried marjoram (not mandatory by any means), and since I like my food hot, I also throw in a bit of red pepper flakes and cayenne into the mix. You can leave this out or add even more if you'd like.
Some recipes have you grind the spices before adding them to the sausage. I prefer to toast mine whole and add them as-is to the meat as it sits in its salt bath overnight. They get crushed as they pass through the grinder along with the meat, giving you plenty of even flavoring without the need to whip out the spice grinder.
Sausages are a never-ending can of worms. I mean, we haven't even begun to talk about complexities such as cooking temperature, cuts of meat, fat content, aging, drying, emulsified sausages, stuffing, smoking, fermenting, or any of the other dozens of ways in which sausages are treated to convert them from awesome-like-a-hot-dog to awesome-like- a-hundred-billion-hot-dogs.
But that's another story for another time.
About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Managing Editor of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.
For full article click here