Home Production of Quality Meats and Sausages Paperback – March 21, 2012

Great book many great idea and suggestions great forthosr that are new or experienced in sausage making g

'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.

When I bought the book I thought I was buying a recipe book for making different kinds of sausages. It has some recipes in it but is much more. It explains why you do everything when making sausage and what the ingredients do and how how they affect flavor so you can make you own recipe! I read it from cover to cover and still go back to re-read parts of it.

Like it and use it .

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

As I jump into sausage making, this book makes it simple and complete. Watching YouTube videos and reading blogs about how to make this or how to make that kind of sausage doesn’t really explain it. There are so many variances between the same content creator making the same things.This book explains the bare minimum on what is REQUIRED, not what someone heard from another person.It is a very easy read, broken down to different aspects of the process. It makes it very easy to follow and if you need to refer back to a step then just go to that chapter.I highly recommend this book and there’s a reason why people refer to this as the sausage making bible.

This book sat in my saved for later list for a long time. I've been a somewhat accomplished hobbyist sausage maker for a few years now and thought that this book was a bit of a luxury as I had several recipes down pat and am pretty much able to satisfy my taste with quality product. I was given an amazon card from my mother in law for my birthday and finally got off the fence and ordered the book. Man oh man I wish I'd gone ahead and ordered this a while back. It is simply excellent. I had debated between this and his fermented sausage book and I'm glad I got this huge "how to manual" of smoked meats, because, in addition to an 80 page chapter on fermented sausages, 150+ recipes, It has info on everything from hams to pastrami to bresola. I've flipped though the Rulman book and this is a text book in comparison to a coffee table book or cook book. This is one of a kind and well worth the price. When I say text book, I mean that complimentary. In addition to the recipes and formulations, Marianski supplys the reader with the theory behind it all. It is very much geared toward creating your own product and recipes and being secure knowing that you are serving your friends and family a safe and quality product. No color pictures, etc. If you just want to learn how to make some bratwurst, this is probably overkill, but if you want to learn how to smoke meats this is it.