With the words, “I’d really like a liver sausage sandwich right now…”, a new chapter began in our culinary repertoire: “If you can’t buy it, you have to make it.” We had also recently seen several nostalgic videos on YouTube about “food from grandmother’s time” or “recipes from the GDR” and wondered if there were any DIY options for this.
It was a rainy weekend and we had nothing better to do, so we sat down at the computer and searched the internet. Thanks to “Chefkoch.de” and similar sites, we quickly found a promising recipe for making liver sausage at home. Wow, this seems easier than we thought. Grandma always had a big slaughter festival, with big pots and tons of meat and sausages, so it was pretty complicated. We quickly realized what the real difficulty was in our case—here in beautiful Texas—finding the right meat and the right ingredients.
Since our local supermarkets usually only offer “standard meat” and you can’t get pork liver, belly meat, or real bacon anywhere, good advice was hard to come by. But since other cultures here also have different eating habits, we explored a Mexican and an Asian market and lo and behold, we found what we were looking for and were very pleasantly surprised.
And off we went: out came the food processor and meat grinder attachment, and we got stuck in!
First, we cut up the meat and brought it to the boil, lightly fried the liver and onions, and then put everything through the grinder. Then all we had to do was add the spice mixture, mix it all together thoroughly, puree it a little, and that was it. Now fill everything into preserving jars and simmer for about 1.5 hours. Wow, not bad at all! And it tastes delicious too.
We’ll do it again the next day, but with a slightly different recipe.
Well, now that we can make liver sausage, let’s try blood sausage. We had already bought the necessary ingredients from the Asian market as a precaution.
We’ll do it again the next day, but this time with a slightly different recipe.
That worked perfectly too (it just didn’t look very appetizing during production).
And because Andrea has now discovered the joy of preserving, she soon went on to make plum jam and peach jam…
So… now our refrigerator is stacked with jars of liver sausage, blood sausage, and jam, and the space for other food has been drastically reduced. Let’s see, maybe we’ll get an extra refrigerator for the delicious “Kuehne specialties” 🙂
And if anyone would like to give it a try, here are our recipes:
- Beef liver sausage (makes 3 jars, approx. 150 g each)
Approx. 300 g beef liver
Approx. 600 g pork belly with 50% meat content
Approx. 80 g onion
Approx. 20 g salt
approx. 1 tbsp marjoram
approx. 1 g ground black pepper
approx. 1 g ground mustard seeds
ground cloves (to taste), if desired
Clean the liver, remove the skin and bile ducts. Then cut into strips approx. 2 cm wide, chop the onion coarsely and brown both in a pan with a little oil.
Cook the pork belly (we use 50/50 pork belly and bacon ends) whole or already cut into cubes in water at 80 °C for 8-10 minutes until tender. Prepare the spice mixture on the side. Then mince the meat, liver, and onions through a 3 mm disc and thoroughly mix in the spice mixture. That’s basically it.
Fill the sausage mixture into jars (to about 2 cm below the rim to prevent bursting), place them in water at 80-85 °C, bring everything to the boil and simmer. The simmering time is calculated from when the water starts to boil. (200 g jars approx. 90 minutes, 400 g jars approx. 120 minutes)