Why it works: Pork and beef match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓
A Good Lean Sausage
Ingredients
Directions
The book gives no oven temperature. The 120°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.
Prepare the meat
Grind the beef trimmings through a 7/64-inch plate.
Chop the beef trimmings fine in a meat cutter, adding 5 pounds of water per 100 pounds of meat for consistency.
Grind the pork cheek meat through a 1-inch plate, using the pork trimmings whole.
Combine the ground beef, pork cheek meat, and whole pork trimmings in a mixer for 5 to 10 minutes.
Stuff, smoke and cook
Stuff the mixture into beef bung casings.
Smoke the sausages for 4 hours, starting at 120°F and raising to 160°F.
Cook the sausages for 2.5 to 3 hours at 160°F.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
The flavor team
The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.
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Pork + beeftop 1% of all pairsSmell alikestrongCooked together5,690 recipes
Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Pork trimmings
- Supply fat and lean meat that give the sausage its body and juiciness.
- Beef trimmings
- Add meaty flavor and firm structure to the sausage mix.
- Pork cheek meat
- Provides lean protein that binds with the fat to hold the sausage together.
The step that matters
Mixing the meat. Mixing for 5 to 10 minutes develops the protein network that binds the meat, so the sausage holds together when sliced and cooked. Undermixing leaves a crumbly texture.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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