Old-Style Frankfurters
Scratch frankfurters — pork cured three days, ground twice, stuffed into hog casings, dried, and cold smoked. From Back to Basics (Abigail Gehring).
Ingredients
- 1 ½ lb pork loin or shoulder
- 1 lb pork fat
- 2 tablespoons salt
- 1 teaspoon white pepper
- ½ teaspoon coriander
- ½ teaspoon nutmeg
- ½ teaspoon cinnamon
- 1 cup iced water
- Hog casings
Brine cure for pork
- 2 gallons water
- 3 lb salt
- 1 lb brown sugar
- 2 tablespoons black pepper
- 5 crushed cloves
- 1 tablespoon white pepper
Instructions
Cure the meat three days in the brine cure.
Grind the cured meat and the fat together twice through a coarse cutting plate.
Mix in the salt and seasonings, then grind again through a medium-fine plate.
Add the iced water slowly and mix thoroughly.
Stuff into hog casings about 18 inches long. Secure both ends and twist in the middle, so each length gives two long thin sausages.
Hang to dry 24 hours, then cold smoke 8 hours, or until the sausages turn deep brown.
To cook, simmer in boiling water 10 minutes. Store under refrigeration.
Notes
Keep the fat ratio where it is. Too little and they come out hard and dry; too much and they shrink and turn greasy.
Prick any air bubbles in the stuffed casing with a needle. Trapped air is where spoilage starts.
Hog casings from a butcher who makes his own sausage are far easier to work with than artificial ones.
A hand-cranked grinder beats an electric one for this — it does not heat the meat while it works.
Photo: Silar, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.