Recipes

Rosette de Lyon

The fat, mellow, coarse dry sausage of Lyon — and it's defined by its casing, not its seasoning. The rosette is the pork bung (the rectum): a wide, irregular, thick-walled natural casing that gives the sausage its bulbous shape and a very slow dry. Set it beside saucisson sec — same country, same meat, same cure, nearly the same spice — and the only real difference is caliber, which is a flavor decision. and it carries a cure-dose correction I'd insist on.

Sausage · French · Cured · Fermented

Rosette de Lyon
Prep 1 hour, plus a 48 h pre-cure and 72 h ferment
Cook None — dry-cured, eaten raw
Serves About 5 lb / 2.3 kg green weight
Level Hard (a bung dries for 8–12 weeks)

The fat, mellow, coarse dry sausage of Lyon — and it’s defined by its casing, not its seasoning. The rosette is the pork bung (the rectum): a wide, irregular, thick-walled natural casing that gives the sausage its bulbous shape and a very slow dry. Set it beside saucisson sec — same country, same meat, same cure, nearly the same spice — and the only real difference is caliber, which is a flavor decision. and it carries a cure-dose correction I’d insist on.

Ingredients

  • MEAT BLOCK (2,270 g / 5 lb green), % of total meat weight:
  • 1,590 g (3 lb 8 oz) lean pork shoulder — 70%
  • 680 g (1 lb 8 oz) hard pork back fat — 30%
  • 64 g salt (2.8%)
  • 5.7 g Cure #2 (0.25% = 156 ppm) — NOT the source’s 5.0 g/kg / 312 ppm (see notes)
  • 6.8 g dextrose (0.3%), 4.5 g sugar (0.2%)
  • 4.5 g black pepper (0.2%)
  • 23 g minced garlic (1.0%)
  • 2.3 g nutmeg, 1.1 g ginger, 0.7 g ground cloves
  • 34 ml red wine (1.5%)
  • 0.27 g Bactoferm T-SPX (0.012%)
  • 50–60 mm pork bung — the rosette casing (substituting a beef middle makes a good sausage that is NOT a rosette)

Directions

  1. Key ingredients: its close sibling is Saucisson Sec — nearly the same paste, a different casing, a different sausage.
  2. Pre-cure 48 hours: cube the meat and fat, mix with the salt and Cure #2, and hold sealed in the fridge two days before grinding. The salt and nitrite penetrate and the meat firms up — a real technique, not a formality.
  3. Grind coarse: lean through 8 mm; hand-cut the partly-frozen back fat into 8 mm cubes. Rosette is coarse and the fat should read as distinct white squares on the slice.
  4. Stuff firmly: into the 50–60 mm bung. Bungs are thick-walled and won’t blow, so pack them tight.
  5. Ferment: 20 °C / 68 °F, 90→85% RH, 72 hours (T-SPX, to a low-acid pH ~5.3).
  6. Dry long: 16 °C falling to 12 °C, 85→80% RH — 45 days minimum, but in a real 60 mm bung expect 8–12 weeks. The thick wall slows everything.
  7. Target only ~30% weight loss: a bigger sausage loses proportionally less and still gets there — the geometry is different from a thin saucisson.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t. Marianski’s structure, with one override.

The cure-dose correction. The source specifies Cure #2 at 5.0 g/kg = 312 ppm ingoing nitrite — double the conventional artisan dose and double what the same site uses on saucisson, salchichón and its other fermented recipes. It’s legal (9 CFR 424.22(b) permits up to 625 ppm in dry-cured) and not dangerous, but it’s an outlier that disagrees with the rest of its own site. I’ve specified 2.5 g/kg (156 ppm) and stated the discrepancy rather than reproduce it silently. A hobbyist formula on wedlinydomowe uses 3.0 g/kg — a useful second opinion.

The teaching point. Caliber is a flavor decision. A 60 mm bung dries so slowly the interior stays moister and the flavor stays mellow and sweet; a 40 mm saucisson dries fast, concentrates harder, tastes sharper. Same meat, same cure — the casing makes the sausage.

The name. Rosette = the pork bung casing; that’s the etymology and the identity.

Still open. Ruhlman & Polcyn’s Charcuterie is on my shelf — worth a cross-check.