- Salt is by far the most important ingredient in sausage.
A sausage simply cannot be made without the right
amount of salt. The name itself comes from the Latin root
for salt (sal, hence Spanish salchicha or Italian salciccia).
Without salt, a sausage will not bind properly. It will be
mealy and mushy instead of snappy and springy. It will be
dry and bland instead of juicy and flavorful.The most basic recipe for a sausage is as follows: Start
with a mixture of 1- to 2-inch chunks of meat and fat in a
4:1 ratio (for extra-juicy sausages, you can use up to 30
percent fat). Add 1 to 2 percent of the total weight of the
meat in salt and allow the mixture to sit overnight in the
fridge. The next day, grind the meat in a well-chilled meat
grinder or food processor. Mix it together carefully with
your hands or with the paddle attachment on the mixer.
Pack into casings if desired, or shape and cook immediately.
That’s it. Simple, right? So, how does the alchemy work?
A Sausage Worth Its Salt
My mother and I are constantly at odds when it comes to
food. I tend to like things saltier than the average person,
while she can’t abide even a pinch of salt. We usually end
up compromising somewhere in the middle, but there is one
food my mother will never get to enjoy in a low-salt variant:
sausage. As anyone who’s ever tried to make a sausage
without salt will tell you, it simply does not work.
To prove this, I ground two batches of pork, both cut
from the same shoulder. The first was seasoned with salt
weighed out at 2 percent of the total weight of the meat (you