To make real home-made saucisson, and for it to keep well and acquire all the flavours of a genuine product, it needs to be steamed.
To make real home made sausage, for it to keep well and acquire all the flavours you expect from a genuine product, it needs to ""sweat"". If you live in a region where the air is quite dry, you can easily dry your sausages at home. Prepare a Toulouse style sausage, add a little salt, hang it on a chestnut perch and leave it to dry. Not everyone is so lucky!
Perhaps you want to make saucisson or to give your sausage the aroma and flavours you get from genuine salted products. No matter what recipe you use, you need to steam it…
Why? After you put your sausage in casing, if you leave it to drain at a clement temperature, you help the lactic bacteria to do their job. This is steaming. These bacteria are naturally present in the meat. They consume the sugars and will manufacture the lactic acid that will preserve the meat.
Just like yoghurt, saucisson is a fermented product!
Once the bacteria have done their job, you will have time to let it dry. The aromas will develop even more, as will the flora. You can also smoke saucisson before drying, but let´s get back to steaming.
How? Steaming or sweating is performed in a hot damp room. Why not hang your saucissons above a cooking pot. A kitchen at 25°C is ideal. The sweating time depends on the temperature and humidity, but under the right conditions, 1 to 3 days should be sufficient. You can also add a little sugar to your mixture (up to 10 grammes per kilo) to feed the lactic bacteria. When they are well fed, they work better and faster. This sugar cannot be tasted because the bacteria will have transformed it into lactic acid. More sugar = more acid, which can be a good thing. See what a touch of acidity does for real salami…
Afterwards After 2 or 3 days, when your saucisson has become firm and begins to turn dark red, it is time to dry it. Place it in a well-aired room where the temperature is between 12 and 15°C: this is perfect. In a few days, a coating will appear. All you have to do now is check on it from time to time and press it with your thumb to judge the dryness, until the day when you cut the first slice…
More info: Lactic bacteria kill the other ones and that is why your saucisson is preserved. But they hate air: oxygen kills them! Encase your saucisson tightly without air. If your saucisson has an air pocket, pierce it with a needle to remove the air.
