Polish sausage kiełbasa biała

Polish sausage kiełbasa biała (“white sausage”) is a fresh sausage usually made from pork and spiced with simply with garlic, marjoram, salt and pepper. Kielbasa is Polish for all sausage in general though it is most often associated with this type of sausage, often just called “Polish sausage” in English. Sausage is prevalent in Polish cuisine, varying by region and even by family. I adapted my recipe from one belonging to a Polish-American family in the Chicago area. It is fitting that I introduce kielbasa as the first Polish entry on Feastern Europe.

You can prepare Polish sausage kiełbasa biała in a number of ways: boiled, sautéed, baked, smoked or a combination of these. I tried a couple different cooking methods for this post; I prefer to simmer the sausage first and then brown it in a skillet before serving. Polish sausage kiełbasa biała pairs superbly with sauerkraut (or kapusta). It can be served any day and at any time of day, though it is almost compulsory at holidays like Easter and Christmas.

Preparations for making Polish sausage kiełbasa biała

To develop good flavor in the finished kielbasa, you’ll want to work over two days. Prepare the ground meat mixture on day one and fill the casings on day two. The process isn’t particularly difficult just time consuming. For the easiest method you’ll need some equipment and supplies for this recipe including a meat grinder with a sausage stuffing attachment and natural casings (preferably hog casings). My grinder is an attachment for a stand mixer (not the one made by the mixer manufacturer). I’ve read and heard a lot of complaints about using this kind of grinder for making sausage however it worked just fine for me.

I have made sausage using a stand-alone meat grinder/stuffer and I’ve also stuffed sausage by hand. In terms of difficulty, I found the method shown here in between those two methods. But don’t worry if you haven’t got a meat grinder. You can still make sausage at home using ground meat from the butcher and a funnel. I know this because I learned to make sausage by hand from Mary Ann Esposito, host of TV’s Ciao Italia, who taught me in her home kitchen. We made Italian sausage that day but the process is the same.

What about the casings?

Natural hog casings are sold dry packed in salt. The salt preserves them and they keep a long time. Before using them you’ll need to soak and rinse them; repack any unused casings in salt and save for your next sausage making adventure. You can get casings online from a number of mass retailers as well as specialty suppliers like The Sausage Maker. Casings are the cleaned intestinal lining from animals like cattle, pigs, sheep or lamb, though any mammal could theoretically serve as a source for them. The size of the animal dictates the size of the casing and thus the diameter of the finished sausage.

Thinking, eww gross? Sausages have been made from intestines for thousands of years. Today you can buy casings mechanically produced from collagen (the primary material in natural casings), cellulose and even plastic. The synthetic casings can give you more uniformity and they are completely shelf stable without salting. But they don’t impart as much flavor from the cooking process to the meat inside because they do not “breathe.” I say go for the natural casings for the most authentic and tastiest experience.

Grinding the forcemeat

The meat mixture for sausage, known as forcemeat, is of course the most important element in your sausage. In fact, plenty of sausage is made and consumed with no casing at all (think breakfast sausage patties or the crumbled sausage on a pizza). We are going to prepare our forcemeat a day before stuffing the casings to give the mixture time to “marinate.” The forcemeat spicing is also where the secrets in family recipes are hidden. My Polish sausage kiełbasa biała recipe is in essence a recipe for spiced forcemeat.

Start with a nice pork shoulder or Boston butt with plenty of marbling and fat layers. You want at least 20% fat in this mixture or your sausage will be dry and lack the appropriate mouthfeel. Fat is a great carrier of flavor so it is really important that you don’t try to cut the fat when selecting the meat. Some recipes even call for adding additional pork fat which I advise you to do if you have a cut that is too lean. If your roast is frozen thaw it for a couple days until it is almost completely thawed but not quite; if starting from fresh, put it in the freezer for an hour or so before you are ready to grind. Partially frozen meat will grind more easily.

Cut the pork into strips narrow enough to fit in the opening of the meat grinder. Attach a coarse grinding plate and place a large bowl under the meat grinder. Grind the meat in batches, adding some of the seasonings with each batch, grinding them all together. Never stick your fingers into the grinder opening; always push the meat with the tool that came with your grinder for that purpose. Grind on a medium speed if using a mixer grinder; you don’t want the meat to come out too mushy. Add an ounce or two of water to the bowl. Give the mixture a good stir to combine. Cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap and put it in the refrigerator for 24 hours. Give the forcemeat mixture a stir before you go to bed, though.

The next day…

Your refrigerator, maybe even your entire kitchen, will smell like garlic. When you get up in the morning, give the meat another stir. When a full day has passed, you can begin preparations for stuffing the sausage. Place the stuffing tube on your meat grinder. Instead of the course grind plate use the one specified for stuffing (mine is kidney shaped). It’ll probably have three large holes. You may or may not attach the cutting knife behind the grinding plate (check the instructions on your appliance). If your grinder has two stuffing tubes, use the larger one. The smaller one is for breakfast sausage or smaller casings.

Before using the natural casings you will need to soak them in clean water, possibly a couple times. When the water looks clear, take one casing and put it under a running stream of water from your faucet. Find the opening and let water flush through it for a few seconds. This also helps you open the casing to slip it on the end of the stuffing tube. Greasing the stuffing tube may help you thread the casing onto it.

Push the casing back towards the grinder until you have thread nearly the entire length of the casing onto the tube. I find it helps if you try to keep the unthreaded portion of the casing centered as much as possible over the opening of the tube. Don’t force it on too quickly or you risk rupturing the casing. You may find it easier to work with a shorter casing at first; cut it to about 30 inches in length and you can get six 5-inch links or five 6-inch links out of it. Leave a couple inches of casing hanging off the end of the stuffing tube and tie a knot in the very end.

Let the stuffing begin!

Some tutorials will tell you not to tie the end of the casing tube. This is so that when you start pushing the stuffing through you don’t end up with a big air pocket at the tip. You can see below that when I turned on the machine the tube blew up like a balloon. The solution to this is to start slowly and just push the first bit of forcemeat to the end and give the air bubble space to move out of the way. Eventually it will come out the other end of the casing towards the end of the process.

Run your mixer on the lowest speed for this process (stand alone grinders may have only one speed). Use the pusher to force meat into the casing. Make sure you have plenty of forcemeat in the hopper so that you can move as seamlessly as possible without having to stop the process frequently. (This process works really nicely with two people; one handling the stuffing tube and another feeding the meat).

Squeeze tight on the stuffing tube so that your filling does not start backing up into the casing that’s still on the tube. You want to direct the filling towards the end of the casing, smoothing with your fingers as needed to keep air pockets from forming along your sausage. But don’t overstuff the casing. It’s hard to describe exactly how much you should fill it but the sausage should still feel a little floppy. You don’t want to risk bursting the casing, either during the stuffing process or while cooking. And you’ll need some “give” to be able to twist the sausage into links. It may take a little practice to get it right. Another reason to avoid overstuffing: your sausage will come out dense and dry tasting when cooked.

Steady does it

Do not rush the stuffing process. Try to keep it moving at a moderate but steady pace. When you get close to the end of the casing, stop while you have enough room to comfortably tie it off. If you’ve put too much filling inside, simply squeeze a little out and put it back in the hopper. Tie off the end and if you think the sausage is way too floppy, you can force some the filling towards the starting end and re-tie a new knot on the finishing end. Just remember not to pack it into the casing too much.

Continue this process with more casing lengths until you’ve used up all the forcemeat mixture. This recipe makes 4 pounds of meat and will require about 14 feet of casing. That sounds like a lot but it will probably use less than 20% of the package of casing. Once you have filled one entire casing, pinch it at regular intervals (I used 6 inch lengths) and twist to form links. There’s a trick to keeping your links twisted as you make them: alternate the direction you twist with each subsequent link. With the first one, twist away from yourself; with the second one towards yourself, etc. Refrigerate your links for a while to help set the shape. Then you can snip them at the twists to separate. Alternatively you can cook them whole and snip after cooking (that’s what I did).

Cooking the kiełbasa biała

For this post I cooked the fresh kielbasa in three ways. I boiled/simmered some of it; some of it I sautéed raw; and I lightly sautéed some of the boiled links. Other methods of preparation include baking it in the oven in some grease or oil, smoking it on a grill and then boiling it, or just grilling it over flame. The only one I haven’t tried yet is baking it even though it’s probably the easiest of all.

My preference is to cook it in water first and then sautéing it for color and deeper flavor before serving. You could freeze kielbasa right after making it or when cooled after boiling. If using it fresh, keep it covered in the fridge and use within 2-3 days. Or cook it first and it will keep in the fridge longer. Serve cooked kielbasa hot or cold.

Some notes on cooking sausages

If you heat the kielbasa too quickly or intensely, you risk the casings bursting. To cook in water, place the sausage in a large pot of cold water. Bring this to a boil over medium-high heat. When it gets to a boil, turn the flame to low and simmer for 40-45 minutes. It doesn’t really matter if you cook it covered or uncovered; you’re cooking it so slowly that you won’t evaporate much of the water. I used an in-between method: partially covered. This allowed the lowest possible flame while retaining some of the heat. You’ll get some foam scum on the water surface. Do not be alarmed by or worry about this.

Sautéing the raw sausage on the stove top also runs the risk of burst casings if you try to do it too quickly. So again, start with a moderate amount of heat. In both cases if you’ve left enough room inside the casing for the moisture to expand when heated there is less likelihood your casings will pop.

I noticed that some of my links had more air pockets than others. I worried they might burst so I used a pin to prick the casing, allowing the air to escape. This was a mistake. The pricked sausage shrank up and ended up really dense and dry. A lot of the fat escaped with the air, too. Let my experiment be a lesson–at least if you’re using the boiling method.

Finally, if you want to make sausage without special equipment

As noted earlier, get four pounds of coarsely ground pork roast at the butcher. Make sure it has plenty of fat. Add the spices from the recipe and let the mixture sit in the refrigerator overnight to infuse flavor. Stir the mixture a couple times, just as if you were going to stuff casings. You could cook patties of ground meat, perhaps a little unusual for Polish sausage. You see Italian or breakfast sausage sold as ground meat for patties all the time.

You could improvise casings by tightly tying up logs of Polish sausage forcemeat in muslin or even plastic wrap and then par-boiling them. I recommend consuming these right away.

For a six inch sausage, take about 2.5-3 ounces of forcemeat and form it into a tight ball. Then roll it with your hands into a cylinder shape. Wrap the sausage in the covering of your choice, twist the material at the ends in opposite directions and tie it off with kitchen twine. Put these packages into boiling water and turn the heat down; simmer for ten minutes. Unwrap them, finish them off with a few minutes in a frying pan then serve. You’ll have link-shaped, casing-free sausages.

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The Polish sausage kiełbasa biała recipe