Sous Chef Erik's Bratwurst | Kenji's Cooking Show

hey everyone this is kenji i'm at my restaurant wurst hall and today sous chef eric is going to show us how to make our bratwurst the first step is to trim the meat i have some beautiful meat here this is some meat that uh is from the leg it's kind of boned out leg as well as some picnic uh shoulder that's kind of from the shoulder area and it's got you can see a good amount of fat and some good fat here but not quite enough that's why i have back fat right here so this back fat is going to give us enough fat to make the sausage juicy and delicious in the way that we need the more fat to a certain extent the better you're looking for about 20 to 35 fat so if people are making this at home um can they use just something like pork shoulder that they buy at the supermarket yes absolutely and in fact um that's what i would recommend doing is going to a good butcher i go to a fatted calf here in the bay area and they can give you pork shoulder that has the fat cap on it that's what you want to ask and then you wouldn't necessarily need the extra pork fat exactly exactly what we do at the restaurant is actually make uh we make sausage out of pork shoulder mainly and then some pork belly or back fat just to provide the right ratio and you don't have to worry too much about getting exactly 20 fat because there's fat kind of inch intramuscular fat going on anyway um but it's good to eyeball it and we are making uh bratwurst this is exactly the recipe we use at the restaurant so um what you are getting here and we we kenji i assume we can post the recipe for people yeah we'll do that um yeah uh so you'll be able to make this at home which is pretty cool um it looks like so it looks like the the cuts you're using here right now don't have a ton of connective tissue no um if there is a lot of you know a pork shoulder will have a lot more connective tissue than that um how much of it do you need to trim out like and how carefully do you need to trim so for home grinders i i actually spend probably more time than most trimming out connective tissue um because i don't want people you know biting into a sausage and getting like chewy connective tissue that's not really pleasant right um so um yeah you do have to spend some time and here's some example of you know kind of this sort of silvery skin you can you can take out and discover and discard exactly especially with a home grinder if you're using like a like a kitchenaid attachment or a small manual grinder that stuff is going to clog up the blades pretty fast exactly and so what i would recommend i'm trimming the meat kind of small even for our grinder i actually prefer trimming meat on the small side because it does help get the meat through the grinder industrial grinders can handle bigger pieces than these if you're making sausage at home i would recommend pieces pretty much about this size maybe even a little smaller and that's going to ensure that you get a good grind the thing you want to do is ensure that you are keeping the meat cold throughout the process that's going to help ensure a couple of things one is you don't want the fat to start melting because that's going to ruin the texture of the sausage i'm obsessive about that because it does make a difference in terms of the the end result um if you've ever had a sausage that kind of has a a grainy texture to it or that the fat runs out of most likely that's because it got too warm while it was being made yes that or it could be a salt issue yeah it could be a salt issue it's like broken sausage and that's um the effect of uh that overheating um and the term for that when it comes out of the the grinder when it's too hot is smear and you do not want smear at all so you can see i'm i'm getting rid of some of this connective tissue you might want to get in here and i'm not being ultra careful and kind of working hastily but you can see kind of the striations here there's some connective tissue okay that white kind of leathery looking stuff is what you're trying to get out exactly exactly okay so let me take some of this fat again you can use um pork belly is a little easier to find at the supermarket than back fat if someone can find something you know i know it's pretty relatively easy to find uh like a salted either salted pork belly salt pork or salted fat back if someone can only find salted but not fresh is there anything they can do with that yes um so what you can do is when you're measuring out the salt for the sausage you set aside all that salted meat that you bought all right you salt the meat that is not salted and then you mix it right um and you know you assume that the salted meat is already salted at the level at a certain level now you have less control over the salt that way of course but that's a good alternative if that's all you can find and actually salted bacon and sausages actually can be quite delicious right so so that is something that you can do so what i'm going to do now is measure out the meat that i have so i have 3728 grams of meat here all right and so now that i have the meat trimmed i'm going to measure out and mix in the salt so i use 2 salt and you can use anything between 1.8 and like 2.2 salt is like a pretty typical range we find that that works really well for us two percent works perfectly for us so 3728 times .02 equals 74 and a half grams roughly okay so i'm going to measure that out hopefully not use my sodium nitrate if you did want to make like a a lower sodium sausage what would the minimum amount of salt you need um the minimum good question the minimum would be one point i'd say 1.6 is probably on the low end um and any lower than that and the sausage just won't bind properly it won't bind properly and it won't you know it won't be won't have uh as long uh kind of refrigerator life um it's just not the the it's not going to behave like sausage or really tastes like sausage and that's because salt um when it comes into contact with meat quickly salt when it comes into contact with meat it actually um breaks down the protein a little bit and so you need that salt in there to allow the proteins to bind um and form this sort of matrix that holds in moisture so it's what gives the sausages springiness as well as what uh what helps the sausage retain moisture so salt is not just about saltiness when it comes to sausages or most kinds of charcuterie all right and so i right now i'm measuring whoa i'm measuring way too much of this um so i'm measuring in the sodium nitrite and that's point zero two five percent um so i multiplied the the total of the trimmed meat by point zero zero two five and so we came around here like nine exactly yeah yeah now what i do is mix it really well so we'll mix this sausage let me move all this stuff out of the way with impeccably clean hands of course kenji right and so i'm going to mix it around and i'm going to cure this so i'm going to put this in the refrigerator overnight and for up to two or even three days for bratwurst and those benefits would be sort of a tighter texture yes better moisture retention exactly so what i'm going to do next and this won't be on camera but you'll see when we take it out of the fridge is i'm going to put some saran wrap directly over the surface just to avoid any oxidation you don't have to do that you could just cover this and then put it in the refrigerator but that's what i'm going to do i'm packing it down so there's there's as little air as possible in uh you know in the meat area and then we'll see you again in a day or so right yeah okay so we're gonna do a little we'll do a little magic swipe here and here we are again hello everyone it's been what a day yes i had a good night's sleep i'm feeling refreshed i'm ready to go all right all right so didn't just change your shirt yeah i did not i swear okay so um let's take a look at the meats uh as i mentioned i put some saran wrap over over the top of me directly over it and it's looking good and the other thing people might notice is that the color will have changed a bit so rather than being sort of the fresh pink color of a fresh meat that's going to be more of a more of a darker color that's the way that's because of the way the salt is interacting with the meat yes yes um so for bratwurst typically it's ground very fine and or emulsified right i don't recommend doing that at home we don't even do that at the restaurant because you really need to control temperature very carefully and that's difficult to do even with equipment like this so i would recommend when you do grind at home use a larger diet to start out if you want to regrind and make sure that it's a little finer grind once spread out the meat on a on a tray freeze it again and then grind it through a smaller die at that point okay now we're using a big old grinder here but you can actually use i think kenji you've used like a hand crank grinder before right yes yeah i use a hand crank grinder at home and and actually um i'll put a link to it but i actually find that at home um a plastic grinder actually works better because um with a big heavy grinder like this you can put all the metal parts into a freezer um or you can work directly while you're in the walk-in or in a cool room and that'll help keep the meat cold but at home the grinders are usually so small that with a metal grinder they pick up ambient you know they they come to ambient temperature really fast um so you actually get more benefit out of using a plastic grinder uh that will keep your meat insulated a little bit better and doesn't start to heat up as you grind okay now all i need to do is find the power switch this is going to get loud you ready [Music] so pretty coarse grind as you can see if we were making this bratwurst for the restaurant we used wheat grind partially through this die and then partially through the smaller of the two dies that i showed you okay and you'll notice i don't even have like a sausage kind of stuffing thing um what you don't want to do is like shove the meat into the grinder assembly and heat everything up make it difficult to uh to grind through you want everything to kind of easily make its way through the gears if you if you do have to kind of force it through it means that there's probably some smearing going on or either some kind of that's right thing is stuck in there and rather than forcing it through you want to disassemble it exactly not the blade and you can see like even at the end it's coming out pretty easily there's no like bunching up that you would see if you saw this kind of bunching up right up here and not falling that would be a problem even at the end this is looking just fine and you can see here you have individual pieces of meat and fat again what you want right [Music] and that's it when it bunches up like that what's going on is that the um the the meat is getting kind of bound up in the in the in the cutting blade and not going straight through the dye and not getting chopped and so what happens is rather than going through the holes it ends up kind of like squeezing out the sides of the dye um and so if you see any if you see it like squeezing out the sides like that or it looks like a paste rather than individual little chunks of meat um that's when you should take it apart clean and keep going precisely um we we missed a chunk leave no chunk behind so i'm going to throw this in here and grind a little more plus i love this sound thank you very much now i have a home grinder that's about a third this size and is ten times as loud home grinders can get very high okay so here we go everything is ready to go here um and the meat looks beautiful you can see it was a little darker before we ground it but it's beautifully pink here and uh and cured um i did not mention i think yesterday that uh that the quality of the meat is going to make its way through the sausage right so um when you are looking for meat the higher quality the better um one way to tell a very good piece of pork from other like pork that you might not want to use is the color of the fat and so this is beautifully white um the the color of the meat itself is pinkish that's what you want you don't want like some gray you know kind of sad pork and some some some types of like um uh heirloom pigs might might even have a reddish meat to them yes yes yeah and that's a great sign actually so okay so we are going to mix in our our seasonings now most people who make sausage would have mixed the seasonings in with the chunks of meat before grinding i do not for a couple of reasons one is if i'm making sausage at home or even at the restaurant i might make more than one kind at a time so what's the point of you know grinding a bunch of meat like one batch at a time having to clean the grinder in between batches doesn't make sense the other thing is i think there's a little more control over seasoning when you grind first with just salted meat than if you put in the seasoning beforehand you're kind of over committing otherwise and then finally i don't want anything to interfere with the grind itself so anything that could gum up the grinder i don't want to even mess with that's why i grind just with the salted meat before adding seasonings okay all right all right so speaking of which we're going look at this display all right so um for bratwurst this is um our bratwurst recipe is traditional as far as bratwurst go pretty traditional we got some dry marjoram you can use fresh marjoram that's that's uh perfectly fine um and are you talking traditional german or traditional wisconsin traditional as far as i know kind of german now i am no no food historian so kenji you might actually know better where this hues in terms of tradition well you know what i find is that in in germany bratwurst typically is an emulsified sausage yes whereas whereas in the us it it tends to be of course coarser yeah in terms of seasonings in terms of seasoning though i think ours is a little more yeah along the lines of german sausages exactly so we have um marjoram i've got nutmeg here everything here is is ground very fine i even ground some of the marjoram to break it up a little bit and that varies depending on the sausage you're using right i measured this all out after knowing how much meat i had and how much how much seasoning so marjoram nutmeg white pepper yes marjoram nutmeg white pepper garlic powder and powdered ginger got it and we'll put the we'll put the exact recipe again um down in the description exactly yes and now we can add um a couple of other things so bratwurst has has eggs in it typically so i'm going to add three eggs and again we will post this i think the recipe we post will probably end up being by the kilogram um so that you can scale it up easily okay so we've got that and you know because this is not a light sausage we've got heavy cream here i'm gonna add some heavy cream and everything here is still very cold right so we use a light beer um we use hellas beer any sort of pilsner will work also this is ondex which is i believe the oldest oldest continuously operating brewery in the world i did not know that i think so okay my partner adam would know better but i'm pretty sure yeah all right so we've got some beer we'll measure it out cheers all right [Music] in terms of liquid and sausage for pork at the restaurant we incorporate 10 liquid um so that may seem like a lot but sausage needs to be juicy and delicious right and so it's important to to add some form of liquid in this case we're using cream and beer you can of course just use water all right so we've got everything in here and the i'm going to mix this it's important to mix the sausage really thoroughly now we use a we have a a mixer that can mix up to 50 pounds of sausage at a time so we don't mix by hand usually but you can ask your question yes is this some kind of a parse to you no this is no this is no joke i'd like to link one pun to another but i can't really do that very easily okay so um my hand is very cold it's this is cold but you know what it for the sake of the right texture that's what it takes it takes having cold hands all right if you're at home you could also use something like a kitchenaid with a um a paddle attachment yes um to do this mixing for you yeah and is there anything that you're specifically looking for as far as the mixture goes like how do you know when it's done so there are a couple of ways of testing you can see it's starting to get kind of it looks a little more uniform and you can see that the proteins are starting to bind together that's a good sign so starting to get kind of tacky yeah tacky exactly and there are a couple of tests that you can you can make one is you can take some of the sausage and then just kind of hold it and if the sausage can stick to your to your hand your impeccably clean or gloved hand for quite a while then the texture looks should be close to reddit and you'll also see as he's going it's starting to kind of form a film around the edge of around the sides of the bowl yep um so it doesn't just pull away cleanly from the bowl so that's some that tackiness that you're seeing here as well yep exactly and it doesn't matter whether you're working with uh pork or beef or poultry you want this kind of effect um all right i think we're pretty much there kenji what about you that looks right to me yeah all right okay so we're ready to stuff now we are all right so we'll do another a little magic wipe cut here all right all right ready to stuff no you don't need a stuffer of course you can just make sausage patties and that is delicious if you try making sausage and you really like it it's pretty easy to invest i would recommend investing in a small sausage stuffer they cost like 100 bucks or something so they're not cheap so make sure you you like you know sausage making before you invest in one but it does make a huge difference in terms of right so these if you buy a if you buy like the kitchenaid attachment for a sausage thing it has a little attachment nozzles um that allow you to stuff sausage but the issue is that that still uses the auger to push through the the the farce especially the sausage mixture yeah which can heat it up so a much better way to do it is with one of these which is a piston stuffer which just pushes the sausage through so it doesn't actually heat it up as much nearly as much i mean it gives you a lot more force which makes it easier to do like a thicker or coarser sausage mixture you know with an auger style sausage stuffer you're going to be really limited in the volume you can do and also the types of sausage you can use yes and it also introduces a lot of air using the auger so this way yeah you know minimizes the air that you introduce in the sausage and you end up with a better better sausage in the end you don't have to poke a bunch of holes in it etc um so we have sausage stuffed in here and as you can see i i did there's no air there are no air pockets in here i really pushed it in to the sausage stuffer and this is not what we use at the restaurant unless it's for testing so if i'm making a small test batch i'll use this small stuffer i think it's got a five pound capacity roughly um but it works really well for home use what's the capacity of the one we use uh the one we use is uh it's 30 pounds so it's much larger industrial size it has two gears it's great as far as stuffers go and now for the the casing itself um so this is hog casing um it's intestine it's kind of on the um the the narrower side in terms of as far as hog casings go we have one of these little easy thread um tubes hopefully it's easy you know if you buy hog casing which you can get online um or at like a sausage supply shop a butcher shop it usually doesn't come with that casing and you kind of have to manually feed it onto the sausage stuffer which yep which is a little bit of a pain in the butt it is in fact i don't need very much so i'm just going to cut this real quick don't do this at home on on metal it's not a good idea okay but all right and in terms of getting the casing ready um so i rinsed this out in several changes of cold water and then i ran the water like cold tap water through this little tube here just to make sure that i get rid of as much salt as possible these already show up clean so you don't have to worry too much about about that but it's never a bad idea to make sure these are as as you know desalinated as possible casing will last a long time because it's packed either in straight salt or it's packed in uh salinated water okay so i think that's good for now in the interest of getting this going so we've got the end of the casing here we're going to slowly turn the crank to try to get as much air out as possible and so now the sausage is coming out you don't have to tie the the end of the link but um i find it helpful all right you're trying to try and tie it with no air trapping yes and you know it's not going to be perfect you can see there's some air there that's why we have this handy sausage pricker as it's known i actually prefer working with a sewing needle with the back of the sewing needle stuck into rolled pork that's what i use at home we just happen to have this so that's what we're using now and when you're stuffing uh you control kind of how tight the stuffing is kind of at the at the end of the stuffing tube so right now i'm not doing much i'm just kind of guiding the casing through so you would you would make a more tightly packed sausage by squeezing tighter and holding the casing back a little more yes and a looser sausage by um keeping your hand looser yes and the idea is that if if you're going to be making this into links you don't want the sausage to be extremely tight at the beginning because you're going to lose because as you start twisting the links they're going to get tighter so if you make it too tight at the beginning and i've done this you know when i was the first time i made sausage i remember doing that and then twisting the links and then having half of them burst open because yes suddenly this casing becomes much tighter when you start twisting them exactly that's there is a learning curve with with this and that's part of the the fun of learning how to make sausages figure out this the methods and systems that work for you okay and i keep things as as neat as possible just because then when i link the sausage it makes it easier to length at the end i tend to stuff on the tighter side for a texture you don't want like too much air in your sausage all right there we go that's good okay so we're pretty much at the end of the road here [Music] so let's take a look here and see what what we're looking at in terms of air bubbles actually looks pretty good kenji so i'm looking for air bubbles certainly at the end of this yeah i'm feeling pretty good about about this uh and i can always use this after i make licks as well now you may freak out because i'm actually piercing holes in the sausage that's not going to affect the sausage in any way it'll affect a bad sausage because yes in a bad sausage the casing is what's holding the fat in but in a well-made sausage is the structure of the sausage itself exactly yes so do pierce my sausage okay so let's uh let's take a look here in terms of um twisting links there are a number of ways that that you can do it um i think that the easiest way is what i'm going to demonstrate shall i move this over this way you're good okay all right um so the way that i twist learn how to twist links the first time is kind of how i still do it um where i find the length that i want and i've got a good um i'm got a good pinch on here okay that's a terrible thing right oh my gosh what happened well you know this happens it's not it's not a huge deal maybe i stuffed it a little too tight maybe that casing is a little weak at that point hopefully this won't happen the next time i do so i twisted this in one direction right now i'm going to squeeze kind of find the second link but i'm not going to twist that link instead i'm going to go to the third link and squeeze and twist that in the same direction again same direction yeah and that way what you end up with is that the sausages are alternating actually alternating directions in which they are twisted yep um so oh there's another one here's another one so you know i think in this case i might have been too too aggressive with the twisting but it's okay the way to fix that on this side is actually to make a really small little you know dud link and then twist again i'm going to twist a little less here this casing is not behaving so well and part of that is not my fault actually it's it's the the casing sometimes we get casing we get them in huge buckets and sometimes they're really sturdy and sometimes they're not that's part of kind of working with a natural product all right this is not performance anxiety here no big money big money this is how not to twist sausage i guess um so i'm actually let's see okay whoa again wow kanji we have we have uh we have faulty casing what are we gonna do um maybe we can twist some more i don't know i think i mean i think you know this is a yeah on this show we show all the mistakes so it's fine like i think that's right this is this is probably going to happen to you guys i mean this is like when i make sauce at home this happens to me occasionally it's not something you really have to worry about it's um it's going to happen to you if you make sausage it's going to happen to you eventually yep exactly and it's happening to me on this youtube channel so that's fantastic all right so let me twist some more all right so we're doing better now and of course we can go faster i'm being ultra careful at this point okay so yeah so see i just pinched it and it broke so we have we have casing that's very difficult to work with and i'll just do my best here and if this were happening at the restaurant we would stop and then we would take it out take it out and redo it in a brand new casing yeah and we would use brand new casing it does happen um it doesn't happen very often so i guess i'm lucky uh but it does happen okay all right so here's here's our beautiful sausage so we've got we've got a coil of sausage um hopefully i bet the first time you do this it will look better than this so you have something to look forward to because you know in this case we had a lot of blowouts but again this will be delicious if you want if you have more casing you can you can take this out of the casing re-stuff it um and in fact i have more meat that i'll i'll stuff later and once you're done with this what's the best way to store it so the best way to store it is actually so now it's a nice neat coil i would uncoil it on a sheet pan like this okay and if you have room in your refrigerator this is a full size you probably don't in your refrigerator but like a half sized sheet can or something like that put it in your refrigerator open uncovered for a while and that's going to help the casing dry out enough so that when you cut the links they won't unravel and so and plus they kind of cure a little more in the refrigerator that way so it works out well when you do cut the links i can demonstrate that quickly what you want to do is kind of pull them apart a little bit so you see where that little twist is so you pull it apart and then you cut like right in the middle and that should ensure that you're not cutting into the sausage so that's about it all right and so when it comes to cooking these um i'll link to the video i've already done that shows you how you can cook these at home um and you know what maybe um maybe when we shut off this camera later today um i can show you how we cook them at the restaurant awesome sounds good all right all right thanks eric okay thank you take care bye-bye [Music] you

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 144,861

Rating: 4.9221649 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: T30N2iyGEJU

Length: 33min 18sec (1998 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/chandlerbikes]

Love this guy’s videos. He explains everything super well and seems like such a nice dude!

[u/soopirV]

Perfect! My sausages tend to be dry and crumbly. Always thought it was getting too warm, which may still be true, but I think I’m undersalting as well. Glad his kept bursting, made me feel better about my own struggles as a home charcuterie-er.

[u/thekeeper228]

I like that they give the restaurant's recipe, knowing that there aren't a lot of people who will make the attempt. Also, Kenji participated in the sous vide sub some years ago and was not only helpful but considered other ideas.

[u/El-mas-puto-de-todos]

Sous chef Eric is the true star 😋

Look up 2 guys & a cooler, they're doing an entire sausage month all October!