The Sausage Being Made

I recently overheard Michael describing to another chef all the systematic changes we’ve made in the last 3 months, to improve the consistency and quality of our sausage making, specifically at the larger scale we’re at now. After facing the unsurprising challenges that came with large growth (we more than doubled this year), in the last 3 months the sausages are better than they’ve ever been, and more importantly, the consistency of their quality has been better than ever.

That effort has taken a lot of work by a lot of people, and certainly was not without its errors. It later occurred to me that all that stuff is really hidden from our community, and it shouldn’t be. So I thought I’d write it up here.

This issue also ties in to the issue of mistakes and imperfections, which I think is interesting and certainly isn’t really talked about much openly by businesses in general. As a result, I see a lot of people when writing or talking about restaurant food that didn’t come out right, have to make guesses or assumptions about what went wrong. Usually, when it’s our system being talked about, I kind of secretly know what really happened, but it’s weird to bring it up — one doesn’t want to argue or appear defensive, but of course how could anyone know where our systems are vulnerable, if we don’t ever talk about it?

Our story of sausage making is totally tied in with our growth. From the moment we opened, we’d come up with a system that worked really well, then we’d grow a little, and everything would shift, and the system would start to break a little (sometimes, a lot). So we’d come up with a new system which worked at the new scale. We’ve grown usually around 30% a year, so it doesn’t take long before something has to change — literally, we’d need a bigger pot. And then a bigger stove. This year we more than doubled, and the challenges increased exponentially.

We first learned about the challenges of scale in March 2005, about 2 weeks after we opened. We were busy enough that I couldn’t make all the sausage we needed while tending bar, making the schedule, doing payroll, etc. So Michael joined the restaurant and started both making sausage and training other people to do it (and also bartending way better than me). In a short time we had gone from a system where I made every sausage they way I knew would work, to a system where the person who made it might be a new trainee. And the best part about new trainees is they are great at finding flaws in your system!

With the kind of scale we’re talking about — at this point we were making batches of about 80 sausages — when the system breaks, it’s not totally obvious at first. What happens is that, where maybe 3% of your sausages weren’t great before, suddenly 50% are great, 25% are OK, and 25% are lousy. Even eating 2 or 3 a week, it might be a week before someone notices that there’s a problem.

But Michael was constantly keeping an eye on things and continued to institute a lot of improvements over my method. But, every few months or so, as the volume increased, we’d see a new way things could go bad. Oftentimes it would be as simple as having started poaching the sausages in a larger pot, which cooked them unevenly. Or making batches that were too big, so the meat didn’t stay cold enough to bind properly. And Michael,
along with other Linkery folks who had experience and ideas, would look for new, more effective, ways to accomplish our tasks.

Snag Science

Here’s the science of sausage:

1. Use the right ratio of meat, fat, and salt in the right physical sizes
2. Keep the meat really cold the whole time — just above freezing. Every moment the meat is above, say, the mid-30′s, its fat changes its chemical composition in an undesirable way
3. Cook it ever so gently, so that the fat doesn’t leak out (which would damage the beautiful ratios in #1)

Meat, Fat and Salt

Getting the right ratios is mostly easy. You figure out your recipes and stick with them. Here are a couple possible slip-ups, though:
* when you up your scale of production, you have to switch from volume to weight. Volume measurements scale funny.
* if you change your supplier of certain ingredients such as salt or spices, they might change in potency. Same thing if they vary in freshness. I remember the first time we got incredibly fresh cayenne in…we nearly killed people.

One thing we’ve started doing recently is grinding the meat and fat at different sizes, so they fit together like different sized marbles in a jar. The pieces bind better ’cause there’s less space between them. It’s Newtonian physics and stuff, but it works.

Fat, Temperature, and Binding

Keeping the meat really cold is the biggest challenge when production starts scaling up. And when the meat doesn’t stay cold enough, it really ruins the sausage in my opinion. The fat turns greasy, the meat gets crumbly, and nothing binds together. You can tell that it’s not overcooked — the meat isn’t burned — but the texture is lousy and there’s no binding. The flavor suffers, too, because it doesn’t have that mouth explosion of the fat and the meat and the spices all hitting you at the same time.

Of course, every time you start making sausages in bigger batches, you end up spending more time with the meat above 33F. That’s because you’re spending more time cutting. grinding, mixing, and stuffing.

What we’ve done recently to make sure that we keep the meat cold is to split the work up into smaller batches, and let the meat get settled to low temperature in between each time working with it. Also, we do as much work as possible in refrigerated spaces, we keep the non-refrigerated spaces as cool as possible through air conditioning, and we are liberal with mixing ice into things. By using all of these methods together we’ve really managed to keep things cold and the texture of the sausages delicious.

Poach Me Gently

The last bit that’s incredibly important is to bring them to temperature slowly so that the fat doesn’t leak out, destroying the ratio and the binding and the flavor. It’s also important that the sausages don’t burn. Obvs.

We poach the sausages in water and let them cool. Then, when you order them, we grill them on the charbroiler.

Some folks have criticized us for doing this, they’ve had dry sausages at our place and attribute it to our method — they believe that cooking raw to grill retains moisture better. However, I’ve run the experiments closely and know that, done correctly, poaching retains moisture better than cooking from raw. (The dry sausages our guests unfortunately got were due to either not keeping the meat cold enough or to not poaching the sausage gently enough or to a too-high temperature.)

Actually, I kind of lied. Any method of cooking works equally well as long as the temperature of the sausage and the ambient media is carefully controlled. The temperature of a pot of water is obviously easier to control than the temperature on a grill, so poaching is preferred to grilling from raw, but for that reason only. (Well, there is probably some benefit to the sausage being in a pot of water, in terms of pressure and osmosis as factors keeping moisture in, but I don’t know that. Where’s my Harold McGee?)

The key, anyway, to keeping moisture in the sausage, is to not let any part of it get too hot! The best way to do this is to poach it in a pot of water which is maintained steadily at the exact temperature you are trying to bring the sausage to, or maybe 3-5 degrees above that temperature. That temperature should be the minimum safe temperature for the meat you’re cooking, and nothing more. Fat melts at different temperatures according to the kind of meat, and breed and feed of the animal, but basically you want as little as possible to melt away.

As soon as the sausage reaches the correct temperature, you remove it from the heat and cool it down as quickly as possible (also in a moist environment so it doesn’t dry out, don’t just stick ‘em in the fridge).

By cooking the sausage this way, you can avoid melting away any of the fat which makes the sausage works. The carefulness is really important with the heritage breeds of animals we often use, because their fat seems to have lower melting point than most modern animals. I assume that’s because the meat from modern animals needs to withstand industrial processes (i.e., make good sausages when made in a factory).

Poaching has been a big source of breakdowns for us, because as we’ve grown we’ve had to use different equipment, different people have done the work and had their own techniques, and when we’d get really overloaded people would end up doing two things at once and lose sight of the temperature of the sausages. We’ve got all those issues ironed out now. But, as we continue to grow, when a new problem occurs, I’d give 75% odds that it will be a poaching issue.

Onward, Sausage Soldiers

There are some other improvements the kitchen has recently made with sausage making, particularly in terms of how long to wait between each step so that the sausage is in ideal condition. Some of that may stay our little secret! In any event, I’ve been really impressed by how much difference they’ve been able to make, and I think the quality of the sausages the last 3 months has been the proof of the (not black) pudding, so to speak.

We’ve learned a lot, and Michael in particular has become a true expert in the art of sausage making, particularly for an operation our size. Which means he’ll be really good at solving the next problem…whatever it may be.

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