Recipes

Sausage, Landjäger (Alpine Butcher's Schedule)

This one is here for the **schedule**, which is the part home recipes get vaguest about exactly where it matters most. It is built on an Austrian trade formulation — the kind of sheet a working butcher runs a 100 kg batch off. The spice in the original is hidden inside a proprietary premix, so as a recipe it is unusable; as a *process* it is the best thing I found. It gives numbers nobody else gives: the final mix temperature (**28–32°F**, colder than almost any home advice), a two-stage grind, the press temperature, and then a **stepped ripening** — hold, then drop to 64°F, then to 61°F after 48 hours, then hold storage at 50–57°F and 75–80% humidity. That stepping is the whole craft. You start warm enough to ferment, then walk the temperature down as the acid arrives and the drying takes over. Home recipes tend to give you one temperature and a shrug. The meat grades in the original are worth reading too, because they line up exactly with the German food code: pork S II (lean), pork S IV (fat-rich), beef R II (sinew-rich). Forty-seven, twenty-eight and twenty-five percent. A butcher's Landjäger is a pork-leaning sausage with beef for structure. I have replaced the premix with an explicit spice blend in the tradition, and the trade cure accelerator with sodium erythorbate, which is what it is. Raw, never cooked. UNTESTED as written. The full safety argument is on the Swabian recipe.

Sausage · Charcuterie · Cured · Smoked Foods · German · Pork · Beef

Prep 3 hours
Cook Never cooked — a stepped ripening schedule over 4 to 6 weeks
Serves About 22 sticks (11 pairs) from a 2 kg meat block
Level Hard

This one is here for the schedule, which is the part home recipes get vaguest about exactly where it matters most.

It is built on an Austrian trade formulation — the kind of sheet a working butcher runs a 100 kg batch off. The spice in the original is hidden inside a proprietary premix, so as a recipe it is unusable; as a process it is the best thing I found. It gives numbers nobody else gives: the final mix temperature (28–32°F, colder than almost any home advice), a two-stage grind, the press temperature, and then a stepped ripening — hold, then drop to 64°F, then to 61°F after 48 hours, then hold storage at 50–57°F and 75–80% humidity.

That stepping is the whole craft. You start warm enough to ferment, then walk the temperature down as the acid arrives and the drying takes over. Home recipes tend to give you one temperature and a shrug.

The meat grades in the original are worth reading too, because they line up exactly with the German food code: pork S II (lean), pork S IV (fat-rich), beef R II (sinew-rich). Forty-seven, twenty-eight and twenty-five percent. A butcher’s Landjäger is a pork-leaning sausage with beef for structure.

I have replaced the premix with an explicit spice blend in the tradition, and the trade cure accelerator with sodium erythorbate, which is what it is.

Raw, never cooked. UNTESTED as written. The full safety argument is on the Swabian recipe.

Ingredients

THE MEAT BLOCK — 2 kg (4 lb 7 oz) total

  • 940 g pork shoulder, lean (47%)
  • 560 g pork belly or fat-rich pork trim (28%)
  • 500 g beef, sinew-rich — chuck, shin or neck (25%)

CURE AND SALT — weighed on a 0.01 g scale

  • 51 g salt, non-iodized
  • 5.0 g Cure #2 / Prague Powder #2 (2.5 g per kg = 156 ppm ingoing nitrite)
  • (the two together = 2.8% total salting, matching the trade sheet’s 28 g/kg)
  • 5 g dextrose
  • 1.0 g sodium erythorbate (0.5 g per kg — the cure accelerator)
  • 0.5 g Bactoferm T-SPX starter culture, in 30 ml distilled water

SPICE — standing in for the trade premix

  • 4 g black pepper, ground
  • 2 g white pepper, ground
  • 3 g coriander seed, ground
  • 3 g caraway seed, toasted and ground
  • 3 g garlic powder
  • 1 g nutmeg, ground
  • 1 g cardamom, ground
  • CASING
  • Hog casing 28/30 or 30/32 mm

Directions

Key ingredients

Black Pepper · Salt

  1. Read this first: raw, never cooked, no kill step. The safety argument in full is on Sausage, Landjäger (Swabian, Traditional Raw).
  2. Part-freeze the meat properly: the trade sheet calls for the pork to go in frozen and the beef fresh. At home, cube everything and freeze it until the edges are hard and the centers still yield — an hour or two depending on your freezer. Grinder parts in the freezer alongside.
  3. Wake the culture: T-SPX in 30 ml distilled water, 30 minutes ahead.
  4. Two-stage grind: first pass everything through 6–8 mm. Then take it down to a final particle of 3 mm. Two stages at increasing fineness give a much cleaner particle than one aggressive pass, because each pass cuts rather than crushes.
  5. Hit the temperature — this is the number the trade sheet cares about: the finished mix should be 28–32°F (−2 to 0°C). That is colder than most home instructions and it is why a butcher’s Landjäger has such clean particle definition. If it climbs past 34°F, stop, spread the block on a tray and put it back in the freezer for 20 minutes. An emulsion breaks above about 59°F, but you lose particle definition long before that.
  6. Mix: salt, cure, erythorbate and culture water first, then the spice blend, then mix to a tacky bind. The erythorbate is doing two jobs — it speeds the cure reaction, and it cuts nitrosamine formation.
  7. Stuff and pair: tight into hog casing, no voids. 32 cm lengths, cut apart, twist at the middle. 80–125 g per stick.
  8. Press and ferment together, 24 hours: flat between boards under 6–7 kg at 68–72°F, 90%+ humidity. This is the trade sheet’s press step and it is doing double duty.
  9. Then ripen 1 to 2 days at 68–72°F: still warm, out of the press or lightly held. This is the rest of the ferment. Check pH at the end — 5.3 or below before you go any further.
  10. Smoke while you step the temperature down: one or two cold-smoke passes a day over beech. After the first 48 hours drop the chamber to 64°F, and then to 61°F. The smoke and the temperature staircase run together — you are not smoking and then drying, you are doing both at once on a descending curve.
  11. Air out after the last pass: a day minimum.
  12. Hold and dry: 50–57°F at 75–80% relative humidity — the trade sheet’s storage condition — until the tagged pair has lost 30–40% of its green weight. Four to six weeks in 28/30.
  13. Why the staircase works: the ferment needs warmth, and warmth is also what Staphylococcus aureus wants. So you spend as little time warm as the culture needs, then walk the temperature down the moment the acid is in place, and let the long cool dry do the rest. A single mid-range temperature is a compromise between two jobs that want opposite things.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t

The process is from an Austrian trade formulation for a 100 kg batch, scaled to a 2 kg home block. The spice blend is mine, not theirs — the original hides its seasoning inside a proprietary premix (14 g/kg of a branded blend) which is simply not a recipe. I have written a blend that fits the tradition: pepper, coriander, caraway, garlic, and small amounts of nutmeg and cardamom. UNTESTED as written.

What I substituted, numbered:

  1. 28 g/kg Nitritpökelsalz → 51 g salt + 5.0 g Cure #2 per 2 kg. Same 2.8% total salting, but with the nitrate reservoir a raw month-long dry needs, and with the ingoing nitrite stated as a number instead of buried in a European product spec.
  2. “Purosa” → sodium erythorbate at 0.5 g/kg. That is what the trade product is: a cure accelerator and antioxidant. 0.5 g/kg is 500 ppm, inside the ~547 ppm legal ceiling.
  3. A branded starter → T-SPX, at the same 0.5 g/kg order of dose. Any traditional slow, cool-profile culture works.
  4. A weight-loss target added. The trade sheet gives storage conditions but no finish number, because a butcher knows what the stick should feel like. I don’t, so I weigh it.

⚠ One thing the safety spine does NOT cover, added 2026-07-24. The hurdle stack — cure, fast acid, full dry — is validated against botulism, Staph aureus, trichinae in pork and shelf-stability. It is not a validated kill step for Salmonella or STEC; USDA says the typical hurdles “may not be as effective as cooking,” and two 2021 outbreaks sickened 70+ people at plants that met every control. Read the full version on Sausage, Landjäger (Swabian, Traditional Raw) before deciding the stack is complete.

What the meat grades tell you

The original specifies pork S II, pork S IV and beef R II. Those are European trade grades: S II is lean pork, S IV is fat-rich pork, R II is sinew-rich beef. They map exactly onto the German food code’s material list for Landjäger — sinew-rich beef, fat-rich pork, fat tissue.

That correspondence is the useful part. It means the code is not an abstraction; it is describing what butchers actually put in the bowl. And it means that if you are building this from premium lean cuts, you are making something more expensive and less correct.

The stepped schedule, in one place

Mix at 28–32°F → press and ferment 24 h at 68–72°F, 90%+ RH → ripen 1–2 days at 68–72°F, pH ≤5.3 → smoke 1–2 passes/day while stepping to 64°F, then 61°F after 48 h → hold 50–57°F at 75–80% RH to 30–40% weight loss.

Variations

The blend is the part I would move. Nutmeg and cardamom are quiet here and could go up. Caraway could come out entirely if you want the Black Forest register rather than the Swabian — though I could not document a distinct “Black Forest” formula in anything authoritative, which is why there is no separate recipe for it in this collection. That gap is honest, not an oversight.

Sourcing and gear

Sodium erythorbate is cheap and sold by every sausage supplier; it is not the same thing as ascorbic acid and it is not vitamin C in any useful sense. It is optional in the recipe and useful in practice.

The rest of the gear list is on Sausage, Landjäger (Swabian, Traditional Raw).

Still open

The original premix’s actual composition. I would like to know how far my blend is from it, and there is no way to find out short of buying it.

And I would like to know whether the 28–32°F final mix temperature is achievable at home without a dedicated bowl chopper. I suspect it is, with a frozen mixer and a fast hand, but I have not proved it.