Delicious Tradition Caring - Smoked Slavic Sausages

Tradition - this is something which, in my opinion, is starting to lose in fight with modernity. I don't want this, so I'm presenting very delicious way to give some chances to tradition to win the battle ;-)

There are many ways to do something for maintaining local traditions, but my way is very tastefull, aromatic and sumptious.

The recipe

Recipe for this particular sausage is in my family since few generations. It is variation of the typical slavic smoked sausage. In my country it;s called "Kiełbasa Swojska".

What will be needed ?

Just some pork and smoker. It could be any type of smoker, even those portable.

First thing to do is to prepare the meat.

In my recipe (in my family it is from few generations) You need to take 30-40% fatty pork meat and 70-60% of lean one. You can use ham, pork, dewlap, shoulder meat for sausage.

Cut the meat into small pieces and then add garlic, juniper berries (not to much, becouse they are bitter) and majoram (a lot).

Typical proportions for 2kg of pork are:

- juniper berries - 20 pieces

- majoram - 50g

When You mix all ingrediends You need to add one more final spice - the beef meat. It gives better taste to the sausage, so it is important. How much beef ? 15-20% of the total pork weight.

Sausages are mede in real guts. You can buy it in the meet or homesteading stores. They are in salty mixture so You need to clean them very good before the use.

After cleaning, use conical ending with grinder to put the meat into the guts.

Smoking is the very wide field, so I wrote only about my method, how I'm doing it (and how my father and his father also did it).

So I'm smoking in the temperature up to 40 Celcius degrees for 8 to 12 hours.

I'm using hazel and alder wood but sometimes also the birch (but the birch isn't very good, it has too much tar in it).

During smoking You need to provide good smoke flow, as seen on my video in this instructable.

After smoking the sausage is ready to eat. It's still a little warm, but very, very aromatic (take this in consideration if You are planning to put such sausage into fridge. If You do that without any cover, everything in the fridge will be aromatic as well ;-)).

I recommend to eat sausages with bread and horseradish. Yummy :) You can also try it with the pickled cucumbers.