It’s a family recipe
A family story with a hidden recipe to make delicious ‘Bratwurst’ ( just use other types of meat).
Karen stands in her grandmother’s kitchen, which looked exactly how it always looked since she remembers anything in her life. With arthritic hands, her almost ninety-year-old grandmother cuts the fresh meat carefully into fist-big pieces.
“We need the fatty shoulder or belly part. I always like to leave the skin on after cleaning. Most nice fat seems to render under the skin, and I don’t want to lose it. If the meat is too fatty, we need to add some leaner meat to it.” Grandma Eva explains to her.
Karen prepared the electric meat grinder. A gift to her grandmother from five years ago. It was still plastic-wrapped. It didn’t surprise Karen because her grandmother was against anything she considered modern. She remembered following the news on the election night 2008 on a black and white TV, maybe the last of its kind.
“We will grind the meat through a coarse grinding plate twice, then switch it to a medium grinding plate. We don’t want it to be too fine, but keep some fat connected to the meat.”
Karen felt sick, seeing the meat pieces, that was once a living creature but came out of the machine ground.
“Now we have to feel the meat, to know if it’s too fatty or too lean. If its too lean, the sausage will be too dry and crumble everywhere, but this here feels just right.”
Her grandmother put Karen’s hand into the bowl, and both massage the ground meat.
“The meat has to leave a greasy smear on your hand, that will take at least a minute to wash-off. Now let’s add the herbs.”
Karen added the prepared mix of fresh ground garlic, kosher salt, black pepper, caraway and coriander seeds, paprika, and rosemary (to get rid of the game taste) to the bowl and mixed it under the meat.
“I like to use fresh casing. It’s important to wash the intestine as clean as possible. Then we cut it into 3 or 4 feet long pieces. Anything we will not need today, we will put in this large salt container. This way, we can keep the casing for the future. But don’t forget, it will be important to rinse off the salt and to soak them in lukewarm water for twenty minutes before stuffing them.”
With fast hands, her grandmother placed the casting on the sausage stuffer. Karen started the machine again, and the meat got stuffed into the casings. Her grandmother worked quickly, filling the casings and cutting equal sized sausages, that she placed on a tray.