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This is my relatively stable recipe for Thüringer Rostbratwurst, a German grilling sausage. That's the official name; I know it simply as Thüringer Bratwurst.
Per kilogram:
| quantity | ingredient | step | ||
| ⅔ kg | Pork shoulder, skinned and deboned | 1 | ||
| ⅓ kg | Pork belly, skinned and deboned | 1 | ||
| 3 g | pepper | 2 | ||
| 3 g | caraway seed | 2 | ||
| 5 g | garlic | 3 | ||
| 1.5 g | marjoram | 4 | ||
| 20 g | salt | 4 | ||
In other words, take two parts of shoulder and one part of pork belly. Australian pork belly is very lean; get the fattest you can. Multiply the net weights above by the total weight of the meat. Note that the skin weighs about 25% of the total, so 2 kg without skin corresponds to 2.7 kg with skin.
Mince the meat twice, first with a coarse cutting disk (8-10 mm), then with a finer one (6 mm). Anything smaller will clog up with sinew.
Grind pepper and caraway.
Peel and crush garlic.
Mix ingredients together, making sure to spread the spices as evenly as possible. I put them on in about four layers between the meat, then mix them.
Put a sausage filling nozzle on the mixer and pull the skin over it. How much? It should be on the package for the casings. For 28 mm casings, you need about 2 metres per kilogram.
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Crank the mixture into the sausage filling machine until it is about to come out of the end of the nozzle. Tie a knot in the end of the casing and crank the mixture into the casing, letting it pull the casing off the nozzle and expand as the mixture goes in. Every 20 cm or so, pinch the casing to interrupt the filling, then turn the sausage to separate the two. Turn alternately left and right so that the sausages don't need to be turned. When the casing is finished, tie the end.
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After something like five years, I think that the current recipe is relatively stable. Initially I used eggs in addition to the ingredients mentioned above. The first time I made this recipe on 17 January 2013, I used 1.18 kg shoulder and 550 g belly. After removing the skin and other bits and pieces, I was left with 1.538 kg meat, a loss of 122 g. See that entry for other comments.
In March 2013 I made two lots of Bratwurst. The first was a catastrophe due to incorrect choice of meat. For 1.5 kg I used 8 g pepper, 5 g caraway, 25 g garlic, 3 g oregano and 40 g salt.
The second batch was made with our new sausage machine. I modified the quantities considerably: for 1.75 kg of sausage I used 5 g pepper, 4 g of caraway seed, 15 g of garlic, 35 g salt, and 2 g of marjoram. I had intended to use 4 g, but that's a lot of marjoram.
On 28 November 2013 we made a large number of sausages with hog casings. One problem with the sausage machine is that after emptying the pressure bucket, there's a lot of sausage meat left over, and it's impractical to fill it into skins. So this time I made about 7 kg of sausages, also almost using up the 12 m of casings. The sausages tasted excellent. Only after eating the first sausages did I discover that I had forgotten the eggs (3 for 2¼ kg of filling). So I'm left wondering whether the improvement in taste was due to the casings or the lack of egg. More importantly, what's the purpose of the eggs? My guess is to make it easier to fill the casings. But I had no trouble without the egg, so I'll leave it out for the while. Only about half the recipes in the next section use eggs.
On 10 September 2014 we had finally finished the previous batch, and I made another batch, again without eggs. In comparison to the last time I only used more marjoram, about 1.3 g per kg. I think the result was better.
Bratwurst sounds as if it should be fried (German „braten“, to fry). In fact, „Brat“ comes from Old High German „brāto“, meaning meat. The preferred means of cooking is in the „Rost“ (“roast”). Still, I fry them. The canonical way is to cook them on relatively low heat for one minute per mm diameter.
I have great difficulty with collagen casings, which very often split. Real gut casings are no problem. I'm currently trying to find a way to fry them without splitting. My guess is that the problem is that the meat is raw when I start cooking, and the change in consistency bursts the skin, so I try cooking them gently (in a microwave oven) first. Here's how I fared:
| Date | Power | Time | Result | |||
| 13 April 2021 | 500 W | 4 min | burst |
When working out a recipe, I used the following sources, all in German:
Rostbratwurst Thüringer Art selber machen, from chefkoch.de. This one wanted a 3:1 ratio of shoulder to belly, 2 eggs and milk, marjoram and garlic, and an unspecified quantity of salt and pepper.
Rostbratwürste Thüringer Art, on the same site. This one wanted a ratio of 1.5:1 shoulder to belly, no herbs, and 17 g salt per kg.
selbstgemachte Bratwurst, yet another recipe from the same site. This looks pretty much the same as the previous one, but it specifies 4 g pepper and 1 g caraway seed for 1.2 kg of filling—and Maggi!
The entry for Thüringer Rostbratwurst in Rezeptewiki. This contains a general description along with a recipe with recursive ingredient list: one of the ingredients is beef sausage meat, which also means that the proportions aren't very interesting. It wants 22 g salt per kg, 2 g pepper, 1 g caraway and 0.5 g Mace.
Several recipes from Bratwurstmuseum. They're of interest because they're genuine recipes from butchers in Thüringen. The one from Herbert Tatzel in Arnstadt seems most typical. Again the proportions are 2:1, and he uses both egg and milk, and also a “pinch” each of caraway and nutmeg, and half a clove (between 0.3 and 6 g) of garlic.
Thüringer Bratwurst from Brigitte, a German woman's magazine. Meat ratio 3:1, one teaspoon of salt per kg, otherwise not particularly different.
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