Dried sausage (sujuk) is a dry solid sausage that is common among the peoples inhabiting Turkey, Croatia, Greece, Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and so on. It takes a lot of time and effort to prepare this dish.
Cooking dry-cured sausage at home is not difficult, but it takes quite a lot of time, as well as perseverance from the culinary specialist. Sujuk is prepared exclusively from lamb or beef, and since the meat is not subjected to heat treatment at all during the cooking process, the selection of raw materials, as well as the preparation of the sausage itself, must be approached with great responsibility.
For sujuk, it is necessary to take exceptionally fresh meat, which should be immediately washed, then dried and frozen, and it is advisable to freeze it at a temperature not lower than -15 degrees. Freezing time is five to seven days.
- a kilogram of lamb or pork;
- 100 grams of fat (you also need to take either mutton or beef fat);
- 1/3 teaspoon sugar;
- 1/3 teaspoon of ground black pepper;
- two cloves of garlic;
- 1/2 teaspoon of cumin;
- 40 grams of salt.
Meat ambassador
Cut the meat into small pieces, rub each piece with salt, place in any enamel container, mixed with chopped fat, for example, in a saucepan, and refrigerate. Leave the meat to salt for seven days at an optimum temperature of +4 degrees.
Minced meat
Grind the salted meat (you must use a meat grinder), cut the fat into pieces (the size of the pieces is about 0.3-0.4 centimeters). In a bowl, combine chopped meat and fat, add spices to the minced meat and mix everything well. Cover the dish with plastic wrap and place the minced meat in the refrigerator for 24 hours.
Sausage stuffing
Take a beef belly, soak it in water for an hour, rinse it, then cut it into pieces of 25-30 centimeters. Tie each shell at one end with cotton twine, about two centimeters back from the edge.
Put the casing on the special sausage stuffer (you can use a regular pastry syringe) and fill each casing loosely with minced meat. Tie the shells at the other end with twine. Examine all the sausages carefully, and if there are bubbles, then pierce them with a thin needle.
Put the resulting loaves on a plate, cover them with another plate, put oppression on top and send them to the refrigerator for three days. As oppression, you can use, for example, a dumbbell pancake. The weight of the oppression should not exceed two kilograms.
In the process of pressing, turn the sausages two to three times a day and put them under oppression again. Pierce the formed air bubbles with a needle.
After pressing, hang the sausages in the refrigerator for three days (this is required for them to dry out), then put them under oppression again for two days. After all the above procedures, hang the sausages in the refrigerator for two weeks and you can start tasting. The shelf life of sujuk at a temperature of +6 to +8 degrees is four months, from +8 to +12 - three months.
