How To Make The Ultimate Two Year Vienna Sausage – A Preppers Guide

Being a prepper for the past 5 years has taught me a good few lessons and I have built up a good supply of food, tools and other essentials in that time. The one thing I have always tried to avoid is tinned or bottled goods. Now, it is not that they are particularly bad, but I drive a small vehicle with a small trailer, so weight is of cardinal importance to me.

What I have done is to make sure that I can make most of the goods that I will need when I get to my destination. The reason behind that is when all your stores. like The Two Year Vienna Sausage, have been exhausted, how will you replace them if you do not know how to make them yourself? Money will likely be worthless or in short supply and so will the goods.

It is for that reason that I have tried to learn how to make as much as I can. Not that I have cooked every recipe that I place on the site, like this one, but I have done quite a few. Unfortunately, I have not tried this one but it does appear quite straightforward and if we follow the recipe. I tell you this to keep my promise that, If I have not tried anything myself, I will tell you in the post and I thought that this was a worthwhile recipe to give you.

Expiry and Best Before Dates

When I was a little younger, about 45yrs or so, very few items have expiry dates or best-before dates. This has become a modern CYA ( Cover Your Ar**) trend among food producers. I have also experienced the importance of these dates…not very.

In my days as a Police Officer, I and many others had to eat Ration packs, and many of them had expired over a year previously. We consumed these without any problems, except, of course, the picked fish. These had usually swollen to the point of almost bursting. Now, the reason I am telling you this is that, in the title, I have stated 2 years. If you are careful and check the food when you open it, you will, on most occasions, find that the food is still good years after the expiry date.

What You Need

Ingredients:

– 500gr ground pork

– 2kg ground beef

– 2 cups cold milk

– 1 cup flour

– ½ cup grated onion

– 3 tbsp salt

– 2 tbsp ground coriander

– 1 tbsp sugar

– 1 tbsp mace

– 1 tbsp paprika

– ½ tbsp cayenne

– 5 tbsp beetroot juice

Spanners:

• Mincing machine
• Sausage attachment
• Bowl for minced ingredients
• Bowl for finished sausages
• Smoker
• Canning Bottles
• Pressure Cooker

Prepping The Meat And The Beetroot Juice

“So, why the beetroot juice,” you ask? Well, have you ever noticed the colour of meat in the supermarket when it’s been on the shelf for a day or 3? Not the most appetising colour. Commercially, they add colouring to the Vienna but we want them without artificial additives, so we colour them with beetroot juice.

To juice the beetroot, you can put it through an electric juicer but such an item is unlikely to be available. Mash your beetroot as fine as you can and then put it through a fine strainer to collect the juice. Luckily you do not need much.

I hope you have packed a hand-meat mincer because you are going to need one for this. Put the meat through the mincer (meat grinder for all those non-South Africans). This must be done twice to get it very fine.

Now add all the other ingredients and then mince the mixture another time or two (if you have a stick blender this will be quicker… if you have electricity, but don’t overheat the blender. Let it rest for 10 minutes to cool down before the second and third round).

Now place the meat in the fridge for two hours.

Putting the meat into the skin

Remember, we are not making Boerewors so we need to use sheep intestines for the thinner Vienna. Make sure that you wash them thoroughly, inside and out, without making holes in them.

Now the fun starts. Pull the skin gently over the sausage filler. Again, don’t make holes. Now we start filling the skins.

Make a hole at the end of the skin and start filling it. Try to make the sausage as long as you can without breaking it. We will twist the individual sausages at the appropriate length when we are done.

When all is done, gently measure the length of the sausage you want (just long enough to fit into your Jars), pinch the sausage at the desired length, pushing the meat away, leaving you with a gap inside the intestine. Now twist the sausage at that point, just like those long balloons that we make figures with. … No! you cannot eat them yet.

How To Smoke The Sausages

This is where your smoker, home make or commercial, comes into play. Fire it up. Divide the coals into 2 so that a metal bowl can fit in between them. Fill the metal container with water, close the lid and leave it until the water boils.

Once the water is boiling, place the sausage on the grill above the boiling water and close the lid again. Leave it to cook until the internal heat is 67 deg C. It takes about an hour.

Heat Treating The Sausages

We now need to Heat treat the sausages now that they are smoked. To do this, you need to mix some brine, 1 teaspoon of salt to 2 cups of water. You can make the brine to suit your taste.

Now you need to fill your jars tightly with the sausages before filling the jar with Brine. Now seal the bottle with the lid, ensuring that you close it tightly. The next step is to place the jars into the pressure cooker and pour in some cold water until it reaches about one-third of the way up the jars.

Turn on the stove and place the pressure cooker on the stove and wait until it boils. Once it starts boiling, leave it boiling for 5 minutes before switching the stove off. Leave the pressure cooker closed until it has reached room temperature.

Now that the pressure cooker has cooled to room temperature, you can remove the bottles from the pressure cooker, dry them and place them in your stores or on a shelf.

Conclusion

As I stated earlier, this recipe appears to be straightforward and would be ideal for making Vienna if you have evacuated to a safer location. Hotdogs with homemade Vienna would put a smile on most people’s faces. Try this out and let me know how you fared.

“It is better to have prepared and never to need it than to be unprepared and be in desperate need of it”.

Be Aware. Be Safe. Be Prepared!

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