Free Mastering the Craft of Making Sausage by Warren R. Anderson Page A

heating the sausage to a certain temperature and maintaining that temperature for a certain number of minutes.) However, many processors of dry-cured sausage have gone out of business; some refuse to change the traditional curing process to a process that will result in an inferior product, and other producers have found the validation requirements to be too burdensome or too expensive.
    What does all this mean for people who make sausage at home? It seems to be clear that it is no longer safe for the average person to make dry-cured sausage. The meat that we might use for dry-cured sausage today, or next week, may not be contaminated by  E. coli  O157, but there is a chance that we will unwittingly use contaminated meat sometime in the future. If we use that meat to make dry-cured sausage using traditional methods, the people who eat that product could become very ill, or even die. If that same meat is used to make fully cooked sausage, the sausage will be perfectly safe because the  E. coli  O157 will be killed. The same precautions used to reduce the risk of salmonella food poisoning, or any other food poisoning, are equally effective for  E. coli  O157; cooking sausage to an internal temperature of 160° F (71° C) will kill  E. coli  O157.
    In this book, there are recipes for salami, summer sausage, Thuringer, and the like, but they will be of the fully cooked variety. Instead of fermenting the sausages, a product called Fermento will be suggested. This commercially prepared product contains lactic acid, and gives the sausage a taste similar to fermented sausage. Some of these products will be  semi dry-cured, but they will be fully cooked.
    Although we can no longer make dry-cured sausages at home safely, I do not think that it is a great loss. In the culinary world, it is commonly believed that making dry-cured sausages is the most difficult task that can be attempted with meat. Special rooms or enclosures with round-the-clock temperature and humidity control are required. But even with these special rooms or enclosures, failure must be expected because it occurs as often as success. Dry-curing sausage is so difficult that many chefs with excellent credentials will not attempt it.
    Nitrites and Nitrates
    At least as early as ancient Rome, impure salts that were mined from certain locations were used to cure meats. The salts from some of these locations were prized for their ability to flavor meats and to give the meats a reddish or pink color, even when fully cooked. A few hundred years ago, it was realized that nitrates were the impurities in those salts that caused the unique flavor and the color fixing effect noted by the ancients. Since then, nitrates have been added to pure salt to cure meats and sausage. The most commonly used nitrate was potassium nitrate (KNO 3 , commonly called saltpeter), but sodium nitrate (NaNO 3 , also known as saltpeter or, less confusingly, as Chile saltpeter) has also been widely used. The Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906 officially authorized the use of nitrates for the curing of commercial meat products.
    Later on in the early 1900s, scientists discovered that the nitrates used for curing would slowly break down into nitrites. It was also discovered that those nitrites were the chemicals that led to the color fixing and flavor changes. Consequently, the U. S. government permitted the direct use of nitrites to cure meats, but placed a limit on the amount that could be used.
    In the late 1960s, it became clear that the use of nitrates and nitrites could cause nitrosamines to be formed under certain conditions, and nitrosamines in substantial amounts were known to act as carcinogens in test animals. Therefore, in the early 1970s, there was much research and discussion about this. Tentative conclusions and a set of guidelines regarding nitrite and nitrate usage were issued in 1975, and there have been no significant changes in the guidelines since that time—this is in spite