Home Production of Quality Meats and Sausages

'Home Production of Quality Meats and Sausages' focuses on the preparation of meats for preservation and on techniques for preserving different cuts through brining, curing, smoking and drying and even canning. This definitely is the book to buy if you want to safely make tasty hams, bacon, sausages of beef and/or pork, poultry or fish and air-dried beef or jerky. There is a useful chapter on barbecue techniqes that includes grilling and smoking and it describes and discusses various smoker, smokehouse or backyard smoker equipment and processes. It is not the aim of this book to guide meatcutters in breaking down carcasses or to provide cooks with information on roasting, stewing, frying and sauteeing cuts of meat, fish or poultry.I have been regularly smoking, curing and drying meats and making sausages for about fifteen years. I divide the books I have used into types along a continuum of 'how to do it' step-by-step recipes through 'how-to-and-why' through 'food science and technical guidebooks.' Recipe-based books that described how to make a specific weight of some product as it was done in a restaurant are at one end of my continuum. Perhaps the best popular example is 'Charcuterie--The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing' by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn. In the middle might be the comprehesive work by Rytek Kutas 'Great Sausages and Meat Curing Recipes' (available from Amazon.) His recipes were aimed more at the person wanting to start their own commercial sausage kitchen. Kutas' recipes were as frank as a business needed to be about the practical uses of additives and extenders and commercially available spice blends. I have long wished to find a book that explained the principles of charcuterie and went on to provide more traditional farm-based, 'slow food' recipes for a range of interesting meat products.In 2010, Stanley and Adam Marianski introduced 'Home Production of Meats and Sausages' and this was the book I have been looking for. This book can be used two ways: Using the well-designed Table of Contents, skip ahead to Chapter 11 and later chapters to find self-contained recipes and techniques for making individual products at home...or, begin at the beginning with the very understandable chapters on 'Principles of Meat Science', 'Curing and Nitrates', 'Comminution Process' (dicing, grinding and emulsifying), 'Mixing,(Casings)and Stuffing', 'Smoking Process(es) and Equipment', 'Cooking' and 'Cooling, Freezing and Thawing.' One of the great strengths of this book is its chapters covering the whole process of making and preserving the products it presents. This is a great 'teaching' book of principles and techniques for making quality meat products. The reader comes away with the 'why' and the 'how' of every step of the process. Recipes produce 'family-size' batches and quantities of ingredients are given in both metric and US terms. As examples of recipe size, the one for Bratwurst calls for 1 1/2 pounds of pork and 2/3 pound of veal; the 'city ham' recipe produces 11-17 pounds of bone-in ham. By referring to the chapter on 'Creating Your Own Recipes', one can find weight or volumetric measures from which to develop recipes on a per-pound of meat basis. This chapter is especially useful for adjusting the amount of spicing, salt or sugar to any quantity of mean one might have to work with.There is a chapter on the principles of making your own recipes for meat products, should you want to vary the 'classic' combinations presented in the ample collection of set recipes. There are chapters of recipes for 'Fresh Sausages', 'Cooked Sausages', 'Emulsified Sausages' (for example,'hot dogs'), 'Boiled Sausages', 'Head Cheese and Meat Jellies', 'Blood Sausages', 'Fermented Sausages' 'Hams, Shoulders and Formed Meat Products', 'Bacon, Loins, Butts'--including Corned Beef and Pastrami(!), 'Air Dried Meats', 'Poultry' and 'Fish'. One Chapter addresses 'Special Sausages'--low-salt; low-fat and Kosher Sausage recipes are presented here. One Chapter deals with 'Wild Game' sausage and preservation. In this 665 page soft cover volume we have a comprehensive account of most of what the home sausage, ham and dried meat producer would like to know and needs to know. While the writing can be repetitive at times, the book is filled with enthusiasm, interest and even with contemporary Polish traditions. Buy this book for using and for keeping!

This was a Christmas gift for my son-in-law. He was pretty pleased with it. A very thorough coverage of all things relating to all types of meat: preservation, preparation, cooking, charcuterie, etc. Good quality paper and clear print.

Great depth of knowledge, lots of supporting information for methods and reasons, along with recipes.

I have a few books , most of them have "ok" recipes, but this one stands on its own. This one is a must have if you attempt make sausage, ferment meat, cold smoke fish etc... Besides giving you various recipes on meat/fish and poultry preserving gives you principles of preparations and exact guides what on amount if ingredients recommended to use. This allows you experiment with your own recipes without risk of poison anyone or over do some of the spices. All recipes and guides presented in US and metric system. This allows easy to scale based on amount of meats used.

I had a different sausage making book in my cart, and at the last minute I chose this one instead because it had so many more reviews than the other one. This is a great book. Even though it is about "home production" of sausages, the authors have kept in mind USDA regulations the entire time, and come from the point of view of meat science and food safety. They want the reader to understand food safety so they consistently make products of high quality. The meat science sections are easy to read, and broken down into simple terms. The book is a tad repetitive, and with some editing it could be a slimmer volume. They give guidelines to making all sorts of different sausages, but also hams and other cured meat products. Also they breakdown the process so you can make a good sausage with whatever spices you feel like, and don't need to follow a specific recipe. But then they also provide a lot of recipes if you want somewhere to start. I am going to be trying the wild game sausages first, as I have a lot of goose in the freezer.Follow up: I used 50 percent goose, 50 percent pork butt, and these recipes came out fabulous. This book really gives formulas to good sausages, rather than recipes.Thus far have tried: Mexican Chorizo, Italian Sausage, Jadgwurst (German Hunter's Sausage), and Polish Hot Smoked Sausage, which was my favorite. All of the seasonings are spot-on. Check out those little buddies I made-Polish Hot Smoked Sausage- the white is frost from the freezer.Edit: Just tried to follow the instructions on how to wet brine a ham, and the recipe calls for twice the amount of salt, Cure # 1 and brine time (45 days) than the recipe on the back of a LEM cure package. I tried to do some more research online, learned there is very little amount of consistency in recipes for curing hams, but everything was close to the LEM cure than the book. Very confused now.