Central Europe · Volume 21, Rye, Smoke and the Kitchen Beside It
Kiełbasa myśliwska, home-smoked
Poland-wide
Illustration
- Time
- 216 hours 30
- Researched
- 10 sources cited
Poland-wide, "hunter's kiełbasa," dry, cured and smoked, historically blending pork with game.
As tradition built it
Makes about 1.5 kg. About 30 minutes to prepare, then 168 to 216 hours (7 to 9 days) curing, plus smoking and several more days drying.
Ingredients
- 1.2 kg pork shoulder, coarsely minced
- 300 g pork back fat, diced small
- 25 g peklosól (curing salt with nitrite)
- 3 garlic cloves, crushed
- marjoram, to taste; about 2 g juniper, crushed; about 2 g black pepper marjoram, juniper, black pepper
- about 2 to 2.5 m, soaked and rinsed natural hog casing
Method
- Mix the meat, fat, garlic, marjoram, juniper, black pepper and cure thoroughly, weighed precisely rather than by eye, since curing salt's nitrite content is doing genuine food-safety work against Clostridium botulinum, not simply adding colour.
- Cure, refrigerated at 4 to 8°C, 7 to 9 days, turning every 2 to 3 days.
- Stuff into casing, twisting into links. Air-dry the casing in a cool, ventilated spot 2 to 4 hours, until the surface is dry and faintly tacky to the touch.
- Cold smoke, below 30°C, ideally 12 to 25°C, over alder and beech (roughly 70:30), several hours over one or more days, until the colour and firmness are right.
- Hang to finish drying in a cool, airy spot for several more days before eating.
What a modern chef changes
A Big Green Egg run as a controlled cold smoker, and a precision the traditional method never had the instruments for
Rung 3
Method
- Run the Egg with a cold-smoke attachment or an offset ash-pan setup, holding a genuinely controlled 15 to 20°C rather than approximating "cool" by eye, a level of temperature control the traditional smokehouse never had access to and which noticeably improves consistency batch to batch.
- Weigh the peklosól to 0.1g accuracy on a kitchen scale rather than a rough spoon measure, treating the food-safety function of the cure with the same seriousness a professional smokehouse would.
- Never attempt to cold-smoke uncured, raw sausage, a genuine safety point worth stating directly: cold smoking works safely only because the meat has already been cured; the traditional cure-then-smoke order in the recipe above is not incidental, it is the safety mechanism, and it must not be skipped or reordered.