Sausages

The spicy chili heat is created by adding extra hot chili powder, such as habanero or jolokia chili. Both of these extremely hot chili varieties have a very aromatic, fruity flavour, but do not change the flavour of the chili sausage as only small amounts are used. A milder chili would necessitate a larger amount of chili powder and would thus significantly impact the taste of the sausage itself. This is considered desirable for a Hungarian paprika salami, but this is not the case for our hot and spicy chili sausages.

Our range of hot chili sausages is split into dried summer sausages (whole salami, whips) and tinned sausage meat with homemade specialities from the Palatine region such as coarse liver sausage, blood sausage, beer sausage and bratwurst.

Dried chili sausage

Our hot chili sausages such as our Chili Salami are all dried sausages. A summer sausage is a raw sausage (not heated), which has been cured using lactic acid bacteria, smoking or air-drying. These preservation methods can be used individually or in combination. The use of nitrate curing salts gives the meat a bright red colour and is a commonly used additive for improving shelf life.

Some of the raw meat is frozen before it is minced (ground) to prevent the sausage meat from becoming too hot in the machine. Alternatively, ice is added to the cutter, however this has a negative impact on the quality. In addition the meat, solid pieces of pork fat with a low water content are added to the cutter along with various different herbs and spices. Pork fat is important for giving the chili sausage a firm consistency. The final sausage meat is filled into natural casing and hung up to cure in air-conditioned chambers for approximately 4-6 weeks. During this phase, the sausages lose around 45% of their weight as a result of moisture loss.

Homemade Tinned Chili Sausage Meat

The term “homemade” to describe this speciality stems from the tradition of home slaughtering. Most families used to keep their own pig, which would be slaughtered around November or December. This was usually a big family celebration as it was a lot of work to properly butcher the whole pig. At the same time, everyone would be rewarded with a big meal together in the evening and new meat stores for the winter. Liver sausage and black pudding or blood sausage are probably the most famous types of “homemade” sausage. Our chili sausage meat is portioned into tinned and carefully heated for around 2 hours in a water bath. The tinned chili sausage meat can then be kept for at least 1 year, although it should be stored below 10°C.