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 A Wonderful Garlic Sausage

Kielbasa

I love kielbasa. I have bought it in stores but you are in for a treat if you can find a family that makes it for themselves.

There are many recipes from many countries and regions. A friend’s family makes kielbasa for special occasions and was kind enough to share their recipe for kielbasa. They don’t use a cure in it and don’t smoke it. They mix up pork, beef and spices using an old hand cranked grinder with a stuffing attachment. They stuff the sausage into hog casings and poach them. It is delicious.

I have to admit I like my Kielbasa smoked which means I also need to use a curing agent to allow for the long smoking period without bacterial toxins forming. So, I adjusted their recipe to be smoked.

Here it is:

Kielbasa

Yield: 8 kielbasa sticks

Kielbasa

Ingredients

  • 8 feet hog casings
  • 667 grams (1 1/2 pounds) fatty pork butt, cubed
  • 333 grams (1/2 pound) Lean beef, cubed
  • 4 cloves garlic, fine chop
  • 5 ml (1 teaspoon) kosher salt
  • 5 ml (1 teaspoon) fine grind black pepper
  • 5 ml (1 teaspoon) dried marjoram
  • 2.5 ml (1/2 teaspoon) Prague Powder 1 (also known as Instacure 1, pink salt)
  • 100 ml (3/4 cup) ice water
  • 50 ml (1/4 cup) dry skim milk powder

Instructions

  1. The night before, rinse hog casings inside and out, 3 times. Hog casings come packed in salt and you need to remove it. Put the casings in a bowl of water and put in the fridge.
  2. The next morning, chill your grinder, stuffer and all meat for a couple of hours. Chilled meat grinds better and keeps the fat in the mixture. You will get a better quality sausage if you keep everything cold.
  3. Grind the beef and pork with a medium grinding plate. Put the meat in the fridge.
  4. Mix the garlic, salt, pepper, marjoram, Prague powder, water and milk powder into a slurry.
  5. Mix the slurry into the meat by pouring it over the meat and folding the edges into the middle and rotating the bowl. I do this for 4 minutes. It ensures a good mix but your hands will get cold.
  6. Put the meat in the refrigerator for an hour.
  7. Set up your stuffer. I use a dedicated sausage stuffer. Most grinders have a stuffing horn you can put on but they are hard to use. Take the hog casing and push it onto the stuffing horn. Tie off the end with an overhand knot.
  8. Put the meat in the stuffer and feed the meat into the casings. Be careful to not over-stuff or it will be difficult to form links.
  9. When all the meat is in the casing, tie off the other end just above the sausage.
  10. Fold the sausage in half. Twist the sausage at the halfway point and use twine to tie it off in two knots 1/4 of an inch apart. Cut between the knots to make two long sausages.
  11. Fold each piece in half again and tie two knots and cut.
  12. Twist each of the pieces in half. You will know have 4 coils of two sausage each. Put these in the fridge overnight.
  13. The next morning, hang the sausage at room temperature for a couple of hours until they are dry on the surface.
  14. Put them in a smoker (I used pecan smoke) and smoke at 180 F for 4 hours or until the internal temperature reaches 120 F, whichever comes first.
  15. Poach the sausages in simmering water until the internal temperature reaches 165 F and then plunge into ice water to stop the cooking.
  16. Hang them for two hours at room temperature (it will improve the colour).
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Kielbasa 1

Kielbasa 2

Kielbasa 3

Kielbasa 4

Kielbasa 5

The Verdict

This is a nice sausage with a great garlic flavour. It is a bit of work but it is well worth it!

The Old Fat Guy

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2 Responses

  1. Looking Good Disco

    You realize how many hogs our forefathers must have butchered to make all the different types of sausages? 500# hog = 2 sides of belly, 2 fresh hams, 4 hocks, 4 trotters, 2 ears, 1 tail, 2 loins, 2 picnics, and sausage meat. Oh and a head for cheese………..

    Correct me, but seems I have seen you make andouille, chorizo, summer, & keilbasa. Would ground and formed bacon be sausage or bacon? Chuckles, so do you think each neighbor had a specialty and they all swaped? More like one guy raised an extra hog or two and just ground it all for sausage.

    BTW I like your verify tool better than most. LOL

    1. Thanks, Foamheart.

      I doubt they took any prime cuts to make sausage but there would be lots of trimming. From what I read, each community had a sausage that they made.

      They had a great episode on Bourdain’s show where he went to an all day party in Louisiana. They killed a pig and different families prepared different parts of the pig. It looked like bliss!

      The Old Fat Guy

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