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!

There is a wealth of information in this book. I knick-named it the 'Meat Bible" because it has easy to follow recipes, very vital procedures to help you get a professional end product, and lists all the safety precautions and steps to keep both you, and your family safe. I look forward to buying his/their other book 1001 Sausage Recipes. A must have book for the DIY home sausage maker.

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.

Just one look at the cover and one realizes that they didn't put much time or money in the Graphic Design portion of the book. Why? They were too busy giving you a bibles worth of information on a tricky subject that is not well defined in the pantheon of cooking books. This book suffers from a few grammatical errors here and there, and a couple anomalies in the way they present multiple amounts in a few of the recipes. Why? Because these are sausage makers that have turned book writers because they want to share their enormous wealth of information. This isn't a beautiful book with glossy pictures and sharp writing. This isn't a book for your coffee table. This is a book to push you to become an expert sausage maker. And it's amazing. I love all kinds of cookbooks - but the kind I love the most are the ones that teach me new methods to make amazing food. And this was the best 15 bucks I've ever spent on a cookbook. Note: All the recipes that put meat through dangerous conditions (ie. botulism loving conditions) use nitrates. They talk a lot about nitrates and don't give ways to avoid nitrates, so if that's what you're looking for steer clear. But it's understandable - cured and cold smoked sausages used to cause a large percentage of fatal food poisoning cases around the world, but nitrates have made them very safe. But there are plenty of recipes without nitrates and there is such good detail in the techniques that you can use the information to change certain techniques of recipes to avoid nitrates - like say, avoiding smoking sausages in the botulism danger range so that you dont need the nitrates. This will affect the taste though. In other words even if you are aiming for the non-nitrate route this book is SUPER helpful.

Book needs better editing! Definitely partial to all things Polish. Information is very good, except the I would sometimes get confused and have to reread some paragraphs because of the terrible editing. Definitely gives you more than enough information to get started making your own meat products. If I was starting new, I would buy Rytek Kutas' book and this book only. Rytek's is a bit easier to read. I reference these 2 books all the time, not just for the recipes, but mostly for the formulas, conversion tables, how to diagrams, etc. This book is better at giving you the math behind building your own formulas than Rytek's, but you should have them both. All the other books I have sit on the shelf when I'm done reading them.

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.

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.

Muy buen libro de charcutería