Sausage Making: The Definitive Guide with Recipes manages to be both a primer and encyclopedia of sausage making all at once. The book covers every aspect of creating your own sausage, from meat grinding to stuffing the casings to perfectly grilling, poaching, and smoking your sausages. The information provided is precise and detailed without being overwhelming to the beginner.
Farr’s “master technique” for sausage making is the foundation for all the recipes in the book, which are divided according to four different sausage types: coarse, firm, soft, and smooth. What is particularly exciting is that each recipe within the four sections is based on an ideal ratio of fatty meat, lean meat, added fat, liquid, and salt. So, while you are free to follow Farr’s delicious recipes to a T, you also have all the information you need to make up your own innovative sausage recipes based on the master technique and ratios.
The one downside to Sausage Making is that the technique outlined in the book requires the home cook to drop $300-500 just to get all the required equipment for correctly making sausage. No doubt, this initial investment would be well worth it to make delicacies like guinea hen and kimchee links, rabbit crépinette, and foie gras boudin blanc in your own kitchen. And, once you’ve mastered these sausages, you can move on to the expert recipes in the back of the book – a series of terrines, galantines and ballotines, and sausage en croute based on traditional French gourmet technique. You’ll know you’ve really mastered all things flesh when you successfully execute the suckling pig ballotine recipe, a deboned whole suckling pig stuffed with Lao sausage and homemade pig's head terrine.
Lisa C. Knisely is the Editor-in-Chief of RENDER.
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