Sausage
I've made sausage for something over forty years — from my grandfather's smoked Polish kielbasa to Irish black pudding — and for the first fifteen of them I had no map. I had recipes, and a recipe tells you what to do without telling you what you're making. This is the map: what a sausage actually is, the family tree the whole craft hangs off, forty years at my own bench, a photo tour of the world's sausages, the blood-and-offal branch America gave up, and how to read a formula without getting the one number wrong that matters. It's the front door to a much larger project — history, equipment, ingredients, making and curing each get their own section as they're built.
More in this series
The hub above is the front door. Beyond it, the program branches into sibling sections, each its own deep dive. These are live now.
- The Landjäger Deep Dive ⭐ One sausage, all the way down — my favorite of the German sausages. What it is, the German and Swiss tradition, the two very different ways it’s made, the safety, and why I make my own after the last shop near me that made the real thing closed. Read this section →
- Old-World History Rome, the guilds, and the deep traditions of Germany, Poland, Italy, France, Spain and beyond — fourteen chapters. Read this section →
- The Wider World China and Japan, the Columbian exchange that rewrote every sausage, Mexico and South America, the Cajun and American branches — thirteen chapters. Read this section →
- Equipment By hand to the grinder, stuffers, smokers, curing chambers — and my own bench. Twelve chapters on the whole kit. Read this section →
- Why Sausage Tastes Different Today The lost butcher shops, the commodity sausage, and why even most artisan shops skimp where it counts — plus my own standard, from fresh garlic to local meat. Read this section →
Coming in this series
The rest of the family, built and published one section at a time. Here's what's still to come.
- Ingredients Meat, fat, salt, the curing salts, cultures, spices, casings — every variable, one at a time. Coming soon
- Making The cold chain, grinding, the bind, emulsions, stuffing, linking, and troubleshooting. Coming soon
- Curing, Smoking & Cooking Food safety, fermenting, drying, cold and hot smoke, the hot-water finish, and how to cook it. Coming soon
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