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 — the code-conforming calibers are hog 28/30–30/32 or sheep 22/24. Tie off ~32 cm lengths, cut them apart, and twist each at its middle to make the pair; each stick should land at 80–125 g. (You’re using Cure #1 here because this version gets cooked — the process decides the cure, never the caliber. See the craft.)
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 cooked 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 Landjäger” — 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 mine, 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 my own 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.

And the collection now carries five of them, written out in full with the cure arithmetic shown, a pH target, and a weight-loss finish — the three numbers the popular home recipes leave out:

Swabian, Traditional Raw — the flagship. A third beef, a third pork shoulder, a third belly; caraway and cracked mustard seed; no garlic. Start here.
Swiss Gendarme, Beef and Red Wine — 80% beef, red wine, garlic and coriander, pressed up to five days. A genuinely different sausage, not an accent.
Alpine Butcher’s Schedule — an Austrian trade sheet’s stepped ripening: mix at 28–32°F, ferment warm, then walk the chamber down 64°F → 61°F → 50–57°F. The schedule is the craft.
Home Smokehouse, Pork-Forward — 90% pork, warm with ginger and nutmeg. Delicious, and technically not a Landjäger at all under the German code. I explain why on the card rather than quietly “fixing” it.
Venison, Wild Game — deer and pork fat, allspice and coriander. Read its safety note before you decide: game trichinae are freeze-resistant and this sausage has no cook step anywhere.

None of those is my Landjäger either — that one is still coming, and still going in the slot above. They’re the real tradition, written down properly, so that when I do settle my own formula I’m arguing with something specific instead of with a memory.

Which raw formula to make

This page used to carry a single generic “reference formula” here. It’s gone, and it should be — it was a composite that matched none of the real traditions, and it disagreed with the actual recipes in the collection on casing size, salt, culture dose and ferment time. Two different numbers for the same sausage on one site is worse than none.

So instead: five real ones, each written out in full with the cure arithmetic shown, a pH target, and a weight-loss finish. Pick by what you want to eat.

Formula	Block	The signature	Casing	Dry
Swabian, Traditional Raw — start here	35% beef / 35% pork shoulder / 30% belly	Caraway and cracked mustard seed. No garlic.	Sheep 22/24	~3 wks
Swiss Gendarme	80% beef / 20% back fat	Red wine, garlic, coriander. Pressed up to five days.	Hog 28/30	4–5 wks
Alpine Butcher’s Schedule	47% pork / 28% fat pork / 25% beef	The trade schedule — mix at 28–32°F, then step the chamber down 64°F → 61°F → 50–57°F	Hog 28/30	4–6 wks
Home Smokehouse, Pork-Forward	90% pork / 10% beef	Ginger, nutmeg, cardamom. Delicious — and not code-conforming, which the card explains rather than hides.	Hog 28/30	4–5 wks
Venison, Wild Game	60% venison / 40% fatty pork	Allspice and coriander. ⚠ Read its safety block first — game trichinae are freeze-resistant and there is no cook step.	Hog 28/30	3–5 wks

All five are Cure #2 at 2.5 g/kg = 156 ppm, a live culture with a verified pH ≤ 5.3, cold smoke that never cooks anything, and 30–40% weight loss on a tagged pair. The mechanics behind each of those numbers are on the craft; the hands-on technique — the cold chain, the grind, the press, the linking — is in Making Sausage.

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.