South African Boerewors Sausage

Step 1

Get out about 10 feet of hog casings and soak them in warm water.

Step 2

Cut the meat and fat into chunks you can fit into your meat grinder. Mix together the salt, pepper, coriander, clove and allspice, then mix this with the meat and fat until every piece has a little on it. Refrigerate overnight if you want, but let it marinate at least an hour or so; this helps develop myosin in the mixture, which helps the texture of the finished sausage. When you are ready to grind, put the meat in the freezer until it is between 30°F and 40°F. Put your grinder parts (auger, dies, blades, etc) in the freezer, too, and put a bowl in the fridge.

Step 3

Grind one-half of the mixture through the coarse die on your grinder, and half through the fine die. This creates a more interesting texture. If your meat mixture is still at 35°F or colder, you can go right to binding. If it has heated up, you need to chill everything back down. Use this time to clean up the grinder.

Step 4

Once the meat is cold, put it in a large bin or bowl and add the sugar, vinegar and brandy. Mix well with your (very clean) hands for 2 to 3 minutes — a good indicator of temperature is that your hands should ache with cold when you do this. You want to to mix until the meat binds to itself. You can also do this in a stand mixer set on its lowest setting, but I find you don’t get as good a bind as you do when you do this by hand.

Step 5

You now have boerewors. Most people stuff this into long coils of about 1 to 2 pounds each. Stuffing sausage is easier with two people, one to fill the links, the other to coil, but I do it solo all the time. Stuff the links well but not super-tight, as you will not be able to tie them off later if they are too full. Don’t worry about air pockets yet. Stuff the casing until you get a coil about a foot wide, leaving lots of room on either end to tie them off; I leave at least three inches of unstuffed casing on either end of the coil. Tie off one end of the coil. Gently compress the sausage in the casing from the other end. Look for air pockets. To remove them, set a large needle or a sausage pricker into a stovetop burner until it glows (this sterilizes it), then pierce the casing at the air pockets. Tie off the other end of the coil and repeat with the rest of the sausage.

Step 6

Set your coil on a rack for an hour or so to dry. You can do this overnight in a fridge if you want. Once dried a bit, the boerewors can be refrigerated for up to a week, or frozen for up to a year.