An Un-Bear-Able Sausage Experiment, Part One

My barony is fortunate to be home to many hunters who are very generous with their spoils. We have often enjoyed venison at local events at no cost to us because of these fine folks. It is along similar lines that I recently came into possession of about eight pounds of bear meat. Oh yes. Bear.

I’ve made bear before. For one Yule event a few years back, I acquired some and turned it into sauerbraten. We called it sauer-bear-ten. With this haul, however, I had another plan in mind: Sausage. 

Because I was unable to find any period recipes for bear, let alone bear sausage, I knew I would need to make up my own, but I needed to do a little more research. I wanted to know how modern hunters made bear sausage, so I could get an idea of what kind of seasonings would pair well with the flavor of the meat. I also wanted to know about specific cooking techniques and timing, as bear is known to be a harborer of Trichinosis.

When all is said and done, I want to serve this sausage in a charcuterie course at the Seven Pearls dinner. My goal is to have a variety of home made sausages and specialty cheeses to provide. However, because they are all being served on the same platter, I wanted to try and add some visual differences to some of the sausage as well. So for this project, I purchased some non-edible, fibrous casings from Amazon. They were two and a half inches in diameter, making them much larger than the usual hog intestine casing I usually use, which comes out to about an inch to an inch and a half in diameter. In period, they probably would have used stomachs or intestines of larger animals to create different sized and shaped sausages. Those can be difficult to find if you don’t have a specialty shop nearby. Even Amazon came up a bit short when I was searching for larger casings. These were the best option I was able to find.

As I said, there are no recipes from 16th century Flemish cookbooks for bear sausage. I even looked into some German and French resources from around the same time. Sabina Welserin has one sausage recipe for venison, but since I intended to use that for a deer venison sausage being served on the same platter, I did not want to replicate the flavor combinations with the bear. 

Bear and pork paste - Yummy!

Because bear is a dark, beefy flavor, I wanted something to bring that out without being too overpowering. I selected a combination of salt, black pepper, cinnamon, coriander, ginger, clove, and grains of paradise to season the meat. All of the spices were found in Flemish cooking during this time period, and I have seen many of them in sausage and meat recipes from the 16th century. 

Believe it or not, bear is an incredibly lean meat. The first time I cooked with it, I seared a small strip in a pan like a steak. No liquid come out as it cooked - my pan remained bone dry the entire time it cooked. So I knew I needed to add some extra fat to this if I was going to get a moist sausage that didn’t crumble when you bit into it. My go-to fat source is pork belly. I get it from my local restaurant supply store, and it has a nice sized fat cap that is perfect for adding fat to sausage. In a pinch, I also use salt pork, which has a much larger fat cap, but I had the pork belly available so that’s what I used. 

I added about ten ounces of pork belly to the not-quite-two pounds of bear and mixed it in by hand. Next, I added my spices and mixed those in. Once they were pretty well incorporated, I put the whole mess into the work bowl of my KitchenAid, turned it up to 6, and let it go for about three or four minutes until the fat and meat were combined into a paste. 

About a cup of water was added next to add moisture, as the paste was still a bit dry. Then it went into the casing.

Insert "meat log" joke here.

Hello, gorgeous.

A friend of mine offered the use of her smoker for this, and who am I to turn down the prospect of smoked sausage?! So I took the monstrosity of meat to her place. For this experiment, I used hickory wood to smoke the sausage. Hickory is a new world tree, so the flavor profile would not have been correct for 16th century Flemish. Apparently the local sporting goods store doesn’t understand that we reenactors need a bit more variety in our wood chip selection. Oak and beech trees are native to the Flemish region of the Netherlands in period, both of which are still used as meat smoking wood today. In my future endeavor, I plan to try them out.

About halfway done.

We smoked the sausage until it reached 175 degrees - Trichinosis is killed off at 160 degrees, but I wanted to be extra sure. It smelled wonderful! 

But...

It was when I cut into and peeled off the casing that my troubles began. 

Most of the sausage was clinging to the inside of the casing, so when I tried to peel it away, it ripped it out of the log formation, casing the whole structure to become a crumbly mess. This is probably a result of a low fat content. Adding more fat will help. I have read on many hunting forums that some 80/20 ground chuck, or pork shoulder should help with this. 

The smoke really enhanced the saltiness of the meat, without bringing out the other flavors. So the result was a salty, but bland, meatloaf. I think the addition of the beef or pork shoulder will help this out tremendously as well, as it will add a greater volume for the salt to season. 

Cue "Price is Right Fail Tuba."

After talking it through with my friend, her family, and my husband, we realized that the final problem with my bear sausage was this strong, bitter flavor we were getting on the back end. It needed a bit of sweet to balance out the cloying nature of the salt and game meat. It was common in period to add dried fruit to sausage, so we tasted a bit of the bear with a few raisins, and OH MY GOD did it make a difference. 

Overall, I call this experience a success - while the sausage was not a hit on the first try, I was able to get some great feedback, and leave with a plan to improve upon the recipe. Thankfully, I have enough bear meat left to apply these improvements. Here’s hoping they work as well as we think they will!

Stay tuned for Part Two of this exciting adventure in meat!