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Danish Smoked Sausage

A sausage made from lean beef, pork, and fat, seasoned with salt, saltpetre, sugar, and pepper, then smoked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pork 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 ↓

Danish Smoked Sausage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Combine the lean beef and pork in a large mixing bowl.

  2. Add the finely cut fat and diced fat to the meat mixture.

  3. In a separate bowl, mix the coarse sea salt, powdered saltpetre, powdered sugar, and ground white pepper.

  4. Sprinkle the seasoning mixture over the meat and fat, and mix thoroughly.

Stuff and smoke

  1. Stuff the mixture into sausage casings and tie off at intervals.

  2. Smoke the sausages according to your preferred method.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

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.

  1. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  2. Pork + white peppertop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together791 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl butyrate (fruity, apple).

  3. Beef + white peppertop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together616 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Pork + sugartop 37% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,579 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Beef + sugartop 37% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Lean beef
Provides the main lean meat structure and savory flavor of the sausage.
Pork
Adds lean meat and flavor that blends with the beef in the sausage.
Fat
Supplies moisture and richness, keeping the sausage juicy as it cooks and smokes.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the meat and helps draw out proteins that bind the mixture together.
Powdered saltpetre
Helps cure the meat and gives the sausage its characteristic pink color and flavor.
Powdered sugar
Balances the salt and cure with a mild sweetness and helps flavor development.

The step that matters

Mixing the seasoning through the meat. Salt and cure must be spread evenly through the whole mixture; uneven mixing leaves pockets of too much or too little salt and curing agent, and fat must stay distributed so the sausage stays juicy rather than crumbly or greasy.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pork, sugar):

  1. Gingerfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Pepperfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pork, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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