Homemade Reuben Sausage

When I was making my first stuffed sausage, Chez John, over at Fat Johnny’s Front Porch, asked if I’d ever had Reuben sausage, told me the ingredients, and said it was outstanding as a grilled fresh sausage. I said I hadn’t but it sounded too good not to give it a try.

I’d been buying corned beef, but decided to try a recipe provided by Andrew over at Gastro Fun With Andrew, so I corned two chuck roasts for the sausage along with the top round I was doing for pastrami.

To get the salt level down, I ended up soaking the chuck in water for three 4 hour stints, with the roasts cut into pieces for the last one.

Chez didn’t give me a recipe, just the ingredients, so there was some trial and err involved. I figured 5oz of corned beef for a sandwich then portioned out a sandwich worth of kraut (2oz) and cheese (1oz) and weighed them. They were close enough to the package amount to just go with that. I mixed it up to those proportions and cooked a test sample while the mix was cooling. I thought it was good as it was and made no adjustments, so my recipe ended up being:

-6# corned beef chuck, cut into 1” chunks
-32 oz Vlasic kraut, drained and chopped
-16 oz high melting temperature Swiss cheese in ¼” dice from Butcher and Packer
-2 tbsp my Pastrami rub
No additional liquid was added as the kraut and meat both had plenty

First, I cut the roasts into 1” cubes, mixed with the rub, and stuck in the freezer on a cookie sheet for a half hour (to be sure the fat was hard), along with my grinder attachment.

In the meantime, I drained and chopped the kraut into smaller pieces.

I decided to make it kind of chunky, so I ran it just one time thru the larger blade of the grinder attachment for my Kitchen Aid mixer.

After grinding, I mixed in the kraut and cheese and put it back in the freezer while I cooked the test sample - still made no adjustments.

Then stuffed it into rinsed and pre-soaked hog casings.  Just like my first attempt at stuffing, I stuffed the first casing too full and had difficulty making links (you can see the blow out lower left of the second picture) so I just tied off the links with butcher twine. I made the next ones smaller and the linking went fine – I believe I now know the right size to make them.

The first time I stuffed sausage, I used an attachment for our Kitchen Aid mixer and while it got the job done, it took two people and was really a pain so I bought a 5# stuffer from Northern Equipment and put it into service for this project. While the mixer grinding attachment will continue to serve my needs well, the new stuffer was infinitely better than using the mixer and I easily did it by myself.

Of course I fried one link up as a test and I thought it was delicious. I’m looking forward to eating the rest of it starting today for lunch. I’ll freeze some of it on a cookie sheet then bag it so I’ll be able to just cut off a link or two when I want some.

Many thanks to Andrew for my new go-to corned beef recipe and to Chez for putting me on to this sausage.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little sausage adventure and I think chorizo will be up next.

All photos can be enlarged by clicking on them.

Have a great day and thanks for stopping by Almost Heaven South.

One year ago: Bev's Mom

Larry