Recipes

Saucisse de Toulouse

The plainest possible good sausage, and the reason to start a French section here: coarse pork, salt, pepper, and essentially nothing else. That's the whole point — it has nowhere to hide. It's the same construction as an Italian sweet sausage minus the fennel, an English banger minus the rusk, a Polish minus the marjoram, so with only salt and pepper on it every failure shows: smeared fat, a broken bind, under-salting. One of the French sausages I cook from my books, now on my own cards.

Sausage · French · Pork

Saucisse de Toulouse
Prep 45 minutes, plus an optional overnight rest
Cook 20 minutes
Serves About 5 lb / 2.3 kg — one long coil
Level Medium

The plainest possible good sausage, and the reason to start a French section here: coarse pork, salt, pepper, and essentially nothing else. That’s the whole point — it has nowhere to hide. It’s the same construction as an Italian sweet sausage minus the fennel, an English banger minus the rusk, a Polish minus the marjoram, so with only salt and pepper on it every failure shows: smeared fat, a broken bind, under-salting. One of the French sausages I cook from my books, now on my own cards.

Ingredients

  • MEAT BLOCK (2,270 g / 5 lb), % of total meat weight:
  • 1,700 g (3 lb 12 oz) pork shoulder/butt — 75%
  • 570 g (1 lb 4 oz) pork back fat — 25% (target 25–30% total fat; shoulder is already fatty, so 85/15 gets you closer to a true 30% if you want it leaner)

SEASONING (% of meat weight)

  • 41 g salt (1.8%)
  • 9 g coarse black pepper (0.4%)
  • 68 ml water or dry white wine (3.0%)
  • 23 g minced garlic (1.0%) — optional; Hank Shaw makes it mandatory
  • 2 g fresh-grated nutmeg (0.1%) — optional
  • NO cure — fresh sausage; add 2.5 g/kg Cure #1 (156 ppm) only if you’ll cold-smoke it or hold it more than a few days
  • 36 mm hog casing

Directions

  1. Key ingredients: Botifarra Crua (Catalan Fresh Sausage) is the same idea 400 km south — pork, salt, pepper, a thin coil — and putting the two side by side is the whole lesson: the plainest sausage in every tradition is the same sausage.
  2. Grind cold: meat at ‑2 to 0 °C, single pass through a 10 mm (3/8”) plate, meat and fat separately. This is coarse on purpose — a 6 mm plate makes it a banger.
  3. Build the primary bind — this is the technique: mix the lean with salt, pepper and the liquid until it’s tacky and grabs the bowl. THEN fold in the fat and mix only enough to distribute. Mixing the fat in early, or working it warm, smears it — and smeared fat renders straight out in the pan.
  4. Stuff: into 36 mm hog casing with no air, and leave it as one long coil — not linked. The coil is the cassoulet-and-grill presentation and it’s diagnostic.
  5. Rest (optional but better): overnight uncovered in the fridge lets the salt work. Marianski goes straight to refrigeration; Shaw hangs it.
  6. Cook to 71 °C / 160 °F — grill, or braise in a cassoulet.
  7. Decision point: taste a fried patty before stuffing. Under-salted here is under-salted forever; this is the sausage where you learn what 1.8% salt actually tastes like.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t. Marianski’s is the reference formula (shows you the sausage with nothing added); Hank Shaw’s is the better eater (60/40 fat, mandatory garlic, ½ cup white wine, an overnight hang). Build Marianski’s first, then decide about the garlic. Note Shaw’s optional Cure #1 works out to ~110 ppm — correct, under the 156 ppm ceiling, not an error.

The teaching point. Toulouse is the control experiment. Same construction as a dozen European fresh sausages with the regional signature stripped out. If there’s one page to teach fresh-sausage technique — the cold chain, the primary bind, the fat fold — it’s this one, precisely because nothing is hiding the mistakes.

Sourcing. 36 mm hog casing; coarsest plate you own. Real pork shoulder, not lean loin — a fresh sausage lives on its fat.

*Still open.Ruhlman & Polcyn and Marianski are both on my shelf — the places to cross-check this.