Dried sausage is an amazingly tasty product. It is not necessary to buy it in the store, you can cook jerky sausage yourself, at home. To make it tasty, it must be properly dried.
How to cook jerky sausage
To prepare traditional jerky sausage, you need to purchase the following ingredients in advance:
- 3 kg of pork neck;
- 4 heads of garlic;
- 10 g marjoram;
- 3 tablespoons of 96% alcohol;
- 90 g of salt;
- ground black pepper;
- 150 g of small pork intestine.
First of all, you should start cooking minced meat. The pork neck is cut into small pieces and passed through a large grinder. However, jerky sausage will turn out much tastier if you chop the pork flesh with a knife.
The size of the pieces should not exceed one centimeter. In this case, the pork is first cut into sufficiently long and thin strips, and then chopped with a wide knife across the fibers. Sausage turns out to be especially tasty if you replace a quarter of the meat with pieces of fresh bacon.
Salt, pre-chopped garlic, marjoram and black pepper are added to the minced meat to taste. After thoroughly mixing the minced meat, it is left alone for about 5 hours so that the meat can be better saturated with salt and spices.
Be sure to cover the container with minced meat with a lid so that the meat does not get windy. It is stirred periodically to achieve an even distribution of spices and salt. At the end of the time, the required amount of alcohol is poured into the minced meat, mixed again and proceeded to stuffing the intestines. If you replace the alcohol with cognac, the finished dried sausage will acquire a pleasant flavor and color.
To cook the sausage, it is necessary to remove the grate from the meat grinder and put in its place a nozzle made in the form of a tube. The intestines are washed with running water and gently wrung out. To make it more convenient to fill the intestine with minced meat, it is cut into approximately equal pieces 50 cm long.
One of these parts is put on the nozzle, tightly tying the other end with a thread. Minced meat is passed through a meat grinder, moving the intestine as it fills. Do not rush, the intestine may burst, so you need to monitor the uniformity of the filling. At the end of the formation of the sausage, the second end of the intestine is also tied with a thread.
How sausage is dried
Sausages need to be pierced in several places and let the air out of them. The bandages are moistened in a saline solution prepared from the calculation: 3 teaspoons of table salt in a glass of water. Then, the sausages are wrapped tightly enough with bandages and hung in a place intended for drying.
It is important to prepare a draft-free area. However, during drying, the room in which the sausage hangs must be well ventilated. The optimum temperature is + 10-15 ° C. In addition, the room should be bright.
After 2-3 days, the sausage is removed and slightly rolled out with a rolling pin, giving a flattened appearance. Also, bandages are removed from the sausages and hung again for further drying. Dried sausage should be dried for at least 2 weeks.
After that, you need to try it for a cut. If the product is not sufficiently dried in the middle, it is sent to the lower compartment of the refrigerator intended for storing meat, setting the temperature to + 2 ° C. The sausage will be kept in the refrigerator for another week. After that, you can serve it to the table.
