Babish’s Ragnarok Sausage

If you’ve never made your own sausage, I recommend it

Babish takes inspiration from the God of War to make this sausage

Difficulty: 2/5

Ingredient Availability: 8/10

Time:4 hours 20 minutes

This wasn’t my first time making sausage. The first time I decided to make 3 varieties, which wasn’t the greatest idea, as it took quite a long time. However, I really enjoyed 2 of the three sausages I made. The Andouille and Onion & Garlic Batwurst were very good and I wouldn’t mind making those again. On the other hand, I made a home made hotdog which I didn’t like nearly as much. Granted, I don’t like any store-bought hotdogs either, so I was the problem. In any case, when I saw this recipe from Babish, I was immediately intrigued. It had been a while since I used my meat grinder attachment and the ingredients used were pretty different from the sausages that I have seen before. On top of that, the recipe is inspired by God of War Ragnarok, which is an obvious brow raiser.

Key Ingredients and Omissions:

I used bacon instead of fatback or pork belly

I had no idea where I’d find wild boar meat

I used all of the ingredients that this recipe called for. Well, kinda.

1. I have no idea where I would find wild boar meat and I doubt many of you do either. I went with the obvious substitute and got some pork, the Boston Butt specifically. If you can get your hands on the wild boar I definitely think it’d be worth a try.

2. Another thing I couldn’t find was fat back. I know I could’ve gone to my local butcher to get pork belly, but I had some bacon at home, which is essentially the same thing as pork belly, so that’s what I used to boost the fat content in this sausage.

Tools:

• Meat grinder attachment and Stand mixer or Meat grinder

• Sharp Knife

Cooking Review:

Cutting meat and grinding: 22 minutes

Before getting to this point, make sure your stand mixer parts have been in the freezer for at least an hour and your meat for about the same amount of time. You want the meat to be firm, but not solid, which helps it grind. Keeping everything cold in general helps prevent the fat from melting and making everything more difficult than it has to be. You could also cube the meats before you put them in the freezer to make that process go a little quicker.

On my stand mixer, I used speed 2 to grind the pork. There’s not much else to this step. Just take your time and feed all the meat through a course grinding plate and refrigerate it while you prepare the seasonings.

Here’s how I cut up the meat

you can put it in the freezer to help make grinding easier

Seasonings: 21 minutes

While writing this, I’m thinking that I could have just used my food processor to shred the onions to save some time and my eyes. Besides that, this step is just mixing the shredded onion with some other spices and then mixing them into the ground meat. Pretty simple.

The meat after being ground and mixed with the seasonings

you can really just fry it up in little patties and skip the rest of the recipe.

Filling Casings: 35 minutes

This is easily the most tedious part of the recipe. Before filling your casings, make sure you follow the package instructions to prepare them. Mine were packed in salt and instructed to rinse off the salt before soaking them in warm water and running water through the insides of the casings. You should prep them in advance.

Once everything was mixed together, I loaded a casing onto the extruder on my meat grinder, tied off the end and poked a hole in it to release any built up air (there will definitely be some). From there, I slowly and steadily fed the ground meat into the grinder. There were a few air pockets I had to work through, but beyond that, It went pretty smoothly. I ended up with 3 links (2 shorter ones and one long one). If I were more patient unraveling the casings, I likely could have gotten 1 long one.

Smoking: 3 hours

I smoked my sausage on a gas grill with a smoke tube loaded with some Cookin Pellets. This is a largely hands off step, but I will say that it took much longer than I expected. I had the grill hovering around 200 degrees during this step and decided to bump it up a little around 2 hours in. The recipe says it should take 45 minutes to an hour and a half to reach an internal temp of 165 degrees, but I pulled mine off at 150 degrees after 3 hours because it was getting pretty late and It should still be cooked enough. This really shouldn’t be much of a problem as long as you cook them before eating. The smoking step is really there to add flavor.

Analysis:

While I didn’t do a patty taste test before stuffing the casings to test for seasoning, I did when cleaning up the sausage that didn’t make it into the casing. In patty form I really enjoyed this sausage. Although the texture wasn’t as firm as most patty sausages I had before, the seasonings were interesting in a good way. It’s hard to explain, but the more earthy spices used in this sausage all complement each other along with the onion and pork. It was also pretty juicy. This gave me high hopes for the cased and smoke sausage. Luckily, most of what I liked about the sausage in patty form carried over to the links. All of the same pleasant flavors were still there along with a nice smokey flavor. It was a little drier than I expected, but this could have just been because I kept checking the temperature after an hour had passed, letting the juices leak out. The casing isn’t as snappy as other sausages are, but it is still there. Overall, I give this recipe a 9/10. It’s a sausage that you can’t find at the grocery store. The Ragnarok sausage has unique flavors while being fairly easy to make despite the time invested. If it could have kept it’s juiciness and the smoking time were a little more accurate, this recipe would have a perfect score.

Here’s what it looks like once it’s been seared up.