Hot Off The Grill !

[hoosier]

I've recently been playing with making my own bratwurst. For those who've never ground or cased sausage, there's not much to be intimidated by. Each time I tinker the results get better but even my first batch was good eating.

For special equipment you need a grinder and a stuffer. These can be the same device with a tube added to the end of a the grinder. The most popular version of this is a Kitchenaid attachment but I would advise against it. The kitchenaid attachment is plastic, slow, expensive for what it is, and you need a KitchenAid. These days dedicated motorized grinders with a stuffing attachment are cheap, powerful, and have cast aluminum and stainless components. I have some $60 amazon rig that is much better than the KitchenAid attachment. If you must have a KitchenAid attachment, look for an ebay older metal one made by hobart or a 3rd party one with aluminum/stainless construction.

My recipe is still in the works but I'm zeroing in on the platonic brat. I say "platonic" instead of "best" because with a comfort food the goal isn't to make the most delicious brat, it's to make the most bratwursty brat; the fact that brats are delicious is besides the point. In other words I don't put pineapple on pizza and I think that people who do, and still call the result pizza, shouldn't have rights.

God's idea of a brat:
5 lbs of pork shoulder. By eyeball test this should be 30-40% fat. You may need to buy fat at the butcher to achieve this ratio.
1.5 oz salt
0.5 oz white pepper
0.25 oz ground ginger
0.25 oz ground nutmeg (buy whole nutmeg and grind with a microplane it makes a difference)
2 eggs
1 c cream
hand full of hog casings
beer to taste

Cut pork and fat into inch size cubes. Put cut pork into the freezer. For the rest of this recipe you'll want your meat to be cold enough to hurt your hands without being frozen solid. If at any point before going into the casing the mixture is not cold enough to hurt your hands, put it in the freezer and drink a beer. Its also a good idea to start soaking your casings in warm water before you start grinding. And its a good idea to get a second pair of hands. IMO sausage making is a two person job even if one person is just there to laugh at all the situational sausage jokes. When pork is sufficiently cold, grind it using a medium die. Now fold in the seasonings, cream, and eggs. Put the mixture through the grinder on medium again. Now it's time to stuff. For me that means adding a tube after the grinding die on my grinder. Previously I thought I could kill two birds with one stone by adding the stuffing tube before the second grind but I do not recommend this. Stuffing is a slower process and the result is that the sausage spends too much time near the knives and die being ground into an emulsified paste even with a medium or large die size. What I do now is disassemble the grinder and put the knife on backwards so it's not shearing against the die. This makes my rig effectively just a motorized stuffer. Soaked casings go on the stuffer tube, leave 6" to tie but don't tie yet. At the beginning of this process there is plenty of air that will be trapped in the casing if you were to tie immediately. There is a technique to feeding the sausage into the stuffer without introducing extra air. The trick is to push it through in short steady strokes. I've found that it is best to stuff the whole casing, twist sections to form links, and THEN tie off the ends. After a few hours in the fridge the twists can be cut and will stay together. Alternatively you can cook the whole rope at once and cut them afterwards. Now you have brats! Oh, and to clean your grinder put bread through it. It should wipe everything pretty darn clean. Any remaining bread can be dissolved by soaking.

Compared to store bought brats, these naturally cased brats will be harder to cook. Pressure inside builds quickly and the casings will want to burst. Also compared to store bought brats, they casing will brown very quickly. The best technique I've found to grill these brats is to use low, maybe even indirect heat on the grill and create an environment more like an oven. Open the lid once in a while and brush each link with beer. This technique was the genesis of the uber-Wisconsin practice of boiling brats in beer btw. Germans typically fry their brats in a pan with butter so to adapt them to the heat of a grill, a pot of beer was placed on the grill to constantly brush/dunk each link to keep them from bursting. When synthetic cases came about that hold up better to the grill, the process morphed into precooking your brats in beer to replicate the old flavor and then grilling them briefly just for color. If completely unburdened by tradition and completely secure in one's masculinity, you might even try roasting these on a sheet pan in the oven at 350. It'd probably come out nice.

This is the key for me. I admire your initiative but the whole enterprise just sounds so goddamned complicated, messy, and time consuming. I guess if I didn't have to work 10 hours and then come home to kids running amok, I might be able to envision something like this. But there would have to be a payoff. Is the taste of the well done homemade brat significantly better than a good brat from the local butchers?

[3irty1]

This is the key for me. I admire your initiative but the whole enterprise just sounds so goddamned complicated, messy, and time consuming. I guess if I didn't have to work 10 hours and then come home to kids running amok, I might be able to envision something like this. But there would have to be a payoff. Is the taste of the well done homemade brat significantly better than a good brat from the local butchers?

There is nothing stopping the local butchers from making exactly what I make, but I've not had it. Butchers are a bit of a culinary silo. Like all good cooking the devil is in the details and I could probably give 10 different butchers the same recipe and get 10 different things back. Hence my verbose recipe that gives all the technique and thought. But to answer your question if you're satisfied with your butcher's brats and lack whatever autism makes someone focus on incrementally improving standard comfort fare, no its not worth getting into sausage just for brats. You at least need to make Italian sausage too.

[Radagast]

There is nothing stopping the local butchers from making exactly what I make, but I've not had it. Butchers are a bit of a culinary silo. Like all good cooking the devil is in the details and I could probably give 10 different butchers the same recipe and get 10 different things back. Hence my verbose recipe that gives all the technique and thought. But to answer your question if you're satisfied with your butcher's brats and lack whatever autism makes someone focus on incrementally improving standard comfort fare, no its not worth getting into sausage just for brats. You at least need to make Italian sausage too.

I'll bet your neighbor/neighbors love you. The cooking smells alone must be incredible.Were I you and had enough to share, I'd invite the close by neighbors over for a feast. You supply your awesome meats and they could bring everything else from baked beans to cake to beverages. A Fall Feast to remember! Talk about a great community gathering other than clearing snow or trees.

[hoosier]

There is nothing stopping the local butchers from making exactly what I make, but I've not had it. Butchers are a bit of a culinary silo. Like all good cooking the devil is in the details and I could probably give 10 different butchers the same recipe and get 10 different things back. Hence my verbose recipe that gives all the technique and thought. But to answer your question if you're satisfied with your butcher's brats and lack whatever autism makes someone focus on incrementally improving standard comfort fare, no its not worth getting into sausage just for brats. You at least need to make Italian sausage too.

In other words, to each his own perversion. I can drink to that.