Making Your Own
This is the stand-at-the-bench page. I’m going to walk you through actually making Landjäger, give you two honest reference formulas — the beginner-safe cooked version and the traditional raw one — and be straight with you about which recipe I keep and whose it is. If you haven’t read the craft yet, read it first; everything here assumes you understand the fork between the cooked method and the raw one, and especially the cure and safety logic. I’m not going to re-explain why Cure #1 goes in the cooked stick and Cure #2 in the raw one — that’s all over there, with the arithmetic.
Start with the cooked method
If this is your first Landjäger, make the cooked semi-dry. I mean that. The raw dry-cured stick is the better sausage and it’s where you’re headed, but it stacks its whole safety on hurdles you have to execute correctly, and there’s no cook at the end to save you. The cooked method gives you a real kill step, no fermentation clock to blow, and a finished sausage that teaches you the feel of the thing — the grind, the stuff, the press, the dry — without the tightrope. Learn the moves here, then graduate.
The shape of a batch
The rhythm is the same one that runs through everything in the collection, and I keep it on a card:
- Keep it cold. Meat near-frozen, bowl chilled, plate chilled. Fat smear is a temperature failure — if it goes greasy and pasty on you, the meat got warm. Grind cold, mix cold, stuff cold.
- Grind. Beef finer (3 mm), pork a touch coarser (5 mm), or a single 6 mm pass to keep it simple.
- Mix in the cure and the tang. Salt, Cure #1, spices, and your tang source (Fermento for the cooked method — it’s a pre-made dairy tang, not a live culture, which is exactly why it fits here). Mix until the meat gets sticky and binds — that primary bind is what holds the sausage together.
- Stuff into hog or sheep casing, in linked pairs of about 20 cm. (For thin casings under ~30 mm, that’s another reason you’re using Cure #1.)
- Press. Lay the pairs between two boards or trays with some weight on top. This is the step that makes it a Landjäger and not a skinny stick — round in, flat out. Overnight in the fridge under light weight is a fine start.
- Dry the surface, then smoke and cook. Hang an hour to dry the casing, then into the smoker: a couple hours of smoke around 140°F, then step the heat up and finish the links to a verified 160°F internal. That 160°F is your kill step — confirm it with a probe, don’t guess.
- Cool, then dry lightly. Ice-bath or cool at room temp, then dry in the fridge or a cool space to about 15% weight loss. Weigh a set green and track it — weight loss is how you know, not the calendar.
- Cut, vacuum-seal, freeze what you’re not eating soon.
A cooked-method reference formula
This is the pattern, not a sacred text — spice it the way you like once you know the moves. Per 1 kg of meat:
| Component | Amount | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Pork (with back fat to ~25% total fat) | ~700 g | 6 mm grind |
| Lean beef | ~300 g | gives bite and color |
| Salt | to taste | |
| Cure #1 | 2.5 g (0.25%) | = 156 ppm nitrite; weigh it on a 0.01 g scale |
| Fermento | ~2–3% of meat weight | pre-made tang; or an encapsulated acid |
| Dextrose / a little sugar | small | rounds the flavor |
| Spices | pepper, coriander, garlic; caraway if you like the Swabian note | |
| Finish | hot-smoke and cook to 160°F internal, then dry to ~15% loss | the cook is the safety step |
Do not use Cure #2 in this cooked version. It buys you no safety once you’re cooking, and it gives you “a very hard link” — the nitrate reservoir doing work it was never needed for. That’s the recipe telling on itself, and it’s a good tell.
The recipe I keep — and whose it is
I want to be honest with you about the specific recipe in my collection, because honesty about sourcing is the whole spirit of this site.
The Landjäger recipe in my collection is not mine. It’s a well-known home method from the Smoking Meat Forums community — the one people pass around as the “Easy Peasy Landjaeger” — and I keep it as a reference because it’s a sound, safe, beginner-friendly example of the cooked semi-dry method. It’s the one with the Fermento and the clear Karo and the 140°F-then-170°F smoke to a 160°F internal and the 15% weight-loss check. If you read it in the collection, you’ll see it’s written in the first person by whoever posted it — that’s their voice and their recipe, not mine, and I’d be lying to you if I dressed it up as my own. It’s a good starting point and I’ve leaned on it, and it earns its place as a reference. But it isn’t the thing I’d hand you as “Jeff’s Landjäger,” because I don’t have that written down yet in a form I’m ready to stand behind.
Which brings me to the honest gap on this page.
My own formula is a work in progress, and I mean that literally. As I say on why I make my own, I’m always fiddling with my Landjäger — adjusting the tang, the smoke, the length of the dry, chasing the memory of the real thing I used to buy in Grand Rapids. I haven’t locked it down, and I’m not going to publish a “Jeff’s Landjäger” recipe here until it’s genuinely settled and genuinely mine, tested enough that I’d put my grandfather’s name on it. When it’s ready, it goes right here, in this spot, with a photo of a batch I actually made. Until then, you get the honest version: a good community reference to start from, and a promise that the real one is coming.
When you’re ready for the raw one
Once the cooked method feels easy — once the grind, the press, and the dry are second nature and the numbers on the craft are in your hands, not on a page — make the traditional raw stick. This is the real article, the Rohwurst the German and Swiss shops make, and it’s worth the graduation.
A traditional raw reference formula
Adapted from Marianski’s standard formula, per 1 kg of meat:
| Component | Amount | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Pork | 700 g | 5 mm grind |
| Lean beef | 300 g | 3 mm grind |
| Added pork back fat | to ~25–30% total fat | keeps it from drying too hard |
| Salt | ~28 g | |
| Cure #2 | 2.5 g | the nitrate reservoir for the long raw hang |
| Dextrose | ~3 g | feeds the live ferment |
| Spices | pepper ~3 g, plus your regional signature (coriander/garlic, caraway if Swabian; some formulas run cumin/nutmeg) | |
| Starter culture (e.g. T-SPX) | ~0.12 g | rehydrate in distilled water, never chlorinated |
Process: stuff 32–36 mm hog casing, link ~20 cm pairs, press flat. Ferment warm and humid (~68°F, ~90–95% RH, ~72 hours) so the pH drops fast — this is the safety-critical window, and the degree-hours table on the craft page is the rule you’re working inside. Then cold-smoke under 68°F for a few hours (it stays raw — the smoke is flavor and surface protection, not a cook). Then air-dry cool (~54–58°F, 80–85% RH) for about three weeks, to 30–40% weight loss. Never cooked. And if you’re eating the pork raw, freeze it first on the trichinae schedule from the craft page.
I won’t pretend the raw method is plug-and-play. It’s the one I’m still chasing myself. But it’s the one worth chasing.
What you’ll want on the bench
The gear side of this — the grinder, the stuffer, the boards and weight for the press, the smoker, the cool space to dry in, and the scales (a 0.01 g scale for the cure is not optional) — gets its own full treatment in the equipment section as it comes online, and the general moves of grinding, the bind, stuffing, and the cold chain live in the making section. The curing, smoking and cooking section is where the drying chamber, the smoke schedules, and the food-safety hurdles get the room they deserve. For now, the craft has everything specific to this sausage.
Make the cooked one first. Learn the press and the dry. Graduate to the raw stick when you’re ready — and when I finally settle my own formula, you’ll find it right here, with a photo of the batch and my name on it at last.
Part of the Landjäger deep dive — one sausage, all the way down. Back to the craft, or the whole sausage program.
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