Dry sausage, step by step
Interactive lesson: home-made dry sausage on the scale — Trichinella and botulism, curing salt, cold mincing, filling, cold smoke and drying to the right weight loss.
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The whole lesson as text
1. Safety first
A dry sausage isn't cooked, so every danger in raw meat has to be overcome another way.
- Trichinella test — Pork without a negative Trichinella result doesn't go into sausage. Smoking and drying don't kill Trichinella.
- Cold meat — Botulism grows without air in the centre of a sausage. It is stopped by nitrite, enough salt, cold in the first weeks and drying.
- Signs of spoilage — If a dry sausage smells putrid in the middle, or has a grey-green or holey centre, don't taste it. Throw out the whole batch from that room.
- At-risk groups — Pregnant women, small children, older and sick people don't eat raw dry sausage. For them it is fried or grilled until it's piping hot in the middle.
Why: When a recipe "by eye" works, it works. When it doesn't, the sausage turns sour, goes green in the middle or, rarely but worst of all, poisons the family. That's why sausage is made on the scale.
- Untested wild boar sausage is the most common cause of trichinellosis in Europe, and bear meat in North America.
- Beef needs no Trichinella test, but pork fat or wild boar fat in sudžuk does.
2. Salt and nitrite
Nitrite gives colour and flavour, but its main job is safety.
- Only curing salt — Never pure nitrite or saltpetre "by eye". A few grams of pure nitrite can kill an adult.
- Scale, not spoon — Curing salt is weighed, not measured by the spoon or the handful. A kitchen scale accurate to 1 g; for Cure #1, to 0.1 g.
- It replaces part of the salt — Total salt 26–28 g per kg of mix. Of that, 13 g of nitrite curing salt at 0.6 % (about 80 mg/kg), the rest non-iodised salt. With Cure #1 only 1.3 g, plus 25–26 g of plain salt.
- Labelled, kept apart — Curing salt is kept labelled, closed, apart from kitchen salt and out of children's reach.
Why: Nitrite holds back the botulism bacterium and slows spoilage, but in large amounts it's a poison. That's why at home you use only a ready-made curing salt, and the two kinds on sale aren't interchangeable: nitrite curing salt has about 0.4–0.6 % nitrite, Cure #1 has 6.25 %.
- What your curing salt contains is written on the packet. Check the rules where you live too.
- Before the pig-killing, weigh the curing salt for the whole batch into a separate container and label it.
3. Casings and mincing · Locked
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4. The mix · Locked
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5. Filling · Locked
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6. Smoke and drying · Locked
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