Recipes

Saucisse de Morteau (Style)

A fat, straight, cold-smoked pork sausage from the Jura — sold raw-smoked and poached by the eater, not cooked and not dried. It sits in a category the collection has nothing in. The honest title is "style," because the real IGP Morteau requires pigs raised in Franche-Comté and fed on whey from the region's Comté-cheese dairies, and that whey feeding genuinely changes the fat. You cannot make Saucisse de Morteau at home. You can make a Morteau-style sausage — and the wooden peg that closes one end is trivial to reproduce.

Sausage · French · Pork · Smoked

Saucisse de Morteau (Style)
Prep 1 hour, plus an overnight rest
Cook 6–24 h smoke, then a 40-minute poach at serving
Serves About 5 lb / 2.3 kg
Level Hard (needs a cold-smoke setup)

A fat, straight, cold-smoked pork sausage from the Jura — sold raw-smoked and poached by the eater, not cooked and not dried. It sits in a category the collection has nothing in. The honest title is “style,” because the real IGP Morteau requires pigs raised in Franche-Comté and fed on whey from the region’s Comté-cheese dairies, and that whey feeding genuinely changes the fat. You cannot make Saucisse de Morteau at home. You can make a Morteau-style sausage — and the wooden peg that closes one end is trivial to reproduce.

Ingredients

  • MEAT BLOCK (2,270 g / 5 lb), % of total meat weight:
  • 1,590 g (3 lb 8 oz) pork (shoulder, ham, loin) — 70%
  • 680 g (1 lb 8 oz) pork back fat / belly — 30%
  • 41 g salt (1.8%)
  • 4.5 g Cure #1 (0.2% = 125 ppm) — #1, not #2: cold-smoked and cooked, not dried for weeks
  • 4.5 g black pepper (0.2%)
  • 16 g minced garlic (0.7%)
  • 2.3 g coriander, 2.3 g cumin, 2.3 g nutmeg (Marianski’s reconstruction; the cahier says only “natural spices” — go plainer if in doubt, the smoke is the flavor)
  • 68 ml dry white wine (3.0%)
  • 40 mm hog casing; a whittled wooden peg (cheville) + natural twine

Directions

  1. Grind: 8 mm, meat and fat.
  2. Mix to a bind; stuff into 40 mm hog casing (the IGP sets 34 mm minimum under 150 g, 40 mm for 150 g and over).
  3. The diagnostic detail: close one end with a whittled wooden peg (cheville) and the other with natural twine. The peg is how you spot a real Morteau on a shelf — and it’s a whittled dowel.
  4. Rest overnight refrigerated so the surface dries and the cure distributes, or the smoke won’t adhere.
  5. Cold-smoke over softwood — spruce or fir only: Marianski runs a thin cold smoke at 18 °C / 64 °F for 48 hours; the IGP asks a minimum 6 hours at max 40 °C in a conventional smokehouse, or 24 hours in a tuyé (the vast conical farmhouse chimney — architecture as equipment). Liquid smoke is expressly forbidden.
  6. Cure or don’t, decided by the process: 48 hours at 18 °C is deep in the danger zone — the Cure #1 is what makes cold smoking safe. This is the clearest case in the whole set of why the process, not the meat, decides whether you cure.
  7. Serve: poach whole ~40 minutes in barely-simmering water to a core of at least 68 °C / 154 °F — with lentils, or in a potée comtoise.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t. Marianski’s home formula bounded by the IGP cahier des charges. and explicitly a Morteau-STYLE sausage: the IGP requires Franche-Comté pigs fed on Comté-dairy whey, which changes the fat and cannot be reproduced elsewhere. Say so plainly rather than pretend.

The teaching point. Cold smoke is a flavor process, not a cooking process, and it requires a cure. This is the clearest example in the set of “cure or don’t” being decided by the process, not the meat.

Sourcing. Spruce/fir smoking wood (not the usual hardwoods); a cold-smoke generator. The Jésus de Morteau is the fatter ≥40 mm version of the same sausage.

Still open. The cahier lists only “natural spices and aromatics”; Marianski’s coriander/cumin/nutmeg is a reconstruction — French popular sources describe Morteau as noticeably plainer.