The Reuben Sausage - Corned Beef Special

It's that time of year where people blow up the internet looking for corned beef recipes, and instead of making corned beef on the channel like I'm sure a whole bunch of other folks are doing, we thought we'd mix it up a little bit. One of my favorite ways to use corned beef is to put it in a little sandwich known as a Reuben. If you're unfamiliar with a Reuben, a Reuben is a delicious sandwich that has corned beef, Swiss cheese, dressing, it's got tangy sauerkraut, and it's stuffed between rye bread. It's absolutely amazing. And so for today's video, I thought we would make the Reuben sausage. Welcome to the Two Guys in a Cooler channel. I hope you're having a great day today for this special midweek episode. My name is Eric, and I'm glad you could join us. And you heard me right. Today, we're going to be making the Reuben sausage. All right. So in full disclosure, I got to admit, I've never made this sausage before. This is a bit of a sausage experiment. And as I was formulating the recipe for this video, what I wanted was kind of like that old world corned beef. You know what I'm talking about? Not the kind of stuff you get at the store, but the kind of stuff you remember eating when you were a kid that was homemade. I'm talking about the real deal. Do you remember that? That's what we're going after today. And I say, let's just go ahead and get into it. But before we do, let me take a minute and thank the sponsor of today's video. This video was sponsored by Skillshare. Are you familiar with Skillshare? Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes for people like you and me. Their classes are specifically designed to just rev up your passions. So what are your passions? Are you into design, photography, art? Are you looking for a new business? Are you into cooking? Skillshare's got you covered. Now I'm going to be completely honest with you. I'm going to be candid with you right now. 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Anyway, thanks a lot Skillshare for sponsoring this video. Let's make the Reuben sausage. This sausage is going to be a beef sausage and you can really use whatever kind of beef you want for this sausage. Just make sure you have 20 or 30 percent fat. I'm using a pack of brisket because I happen to have one. And for the most part, the fat on a brisket is acceptable for sausage, especially the smooth fat just like this. This is great for sausage. There is some flaky fat on the brisket. I don't normally include that because I don't particularly like that fat in the sausage. And so I'm just going to render that down and make beef tallow. But as far as the fat cap, the intermuscular fat, all of that is great for sausage. So we're just going to go ahead and process this by cutting it up into small cubes, small enough to fit into my grinder. And then we're going to place it into the freezer. All right. These are the spices that we're going to be using. We've got some turbinado sugar. We've got salt and cure number one. This is potato starch. We'll add that when we mix it. We've got some freshly cracked black pepper, bay leaf. This is mustard seed, some cinnamon. In this little bowl, we've got some whole cloves and some juniper berries. That's going to be awesome. Toasted coriander seeds, allspice and then some ground ginger. And that's basically going to be the spice profile for this particular recipe. And there's a lot of European influence in the spices that we chose to use. And so I think that's going to bring out, you know, kind of that old world flavor that I'm looking for. And so with a mortar and pestle, I'm just going to grind up my whole spices and turn everything into a powder. If you don't have a mortar and pestle, you can throw everything into a spice grinder or even your blender and blend it up for a little while. And that'll turn everything into a powder pretty quick. One relatively easy way to approach this recipe. Now, you're probably not going to get the same flavor is to simply go to the store and buy corned beef. They generally have a seasoning packet, you know, with the meat and you can use that seasoning packet as the spices for the sausage. Now, it's obviously not going to taste the same, but I think it'll embody the same spirit of what we're trying to accomplish. So, and at this point, our meat is properly chilled. So let's go ahead and grind our beef. It's below 34 degrees, which is perfect. And I'm going to be grinding this on a six millimeter plate. Let's give it a quick temperature check and just see where it's at. It looks like we are at 30 degrees. Perfect. And for the next step, we're going to go ahead and take our freshly ground beef and season it with 100% of our spice mix that we just made. And then we're going to let it rest in the refrigerator overnight. This is going to allow those spices to penetrate the meat. It's going to allow the cure that we've added to do its job. It's also going to help extract proteins that are salt soluble, like myosin and actin, which is going to act like a glue when we mix our sausage. So allowing this to rest in the refrigerator overnight is just going to have a positive influence on the flavor and the texture of our Reuben sausage. So let's go ahead and finish putting in the rest of those spices. Once we got it nice and mixed up, I'm going to transfer that to a bowl, cover it, and then just place it in refrigerator overnight. 12 hours is sufficient for this particular process. And I got to tell you, at this point, this meat smells absolutely amazing. I mean, it smells like freshly homemade corn beef. So I cannot wait to see how this is going to turn out. All right. So into the fridge it goes. 12 hours later, we're going to give this a little mix. We're also going to add our potato starch and we're going to add some liquid. And then we're just going to mix this until it gets nice and sticky, at which point we're going to add our cubed Swiss cheese, give it a little mix to incorporate, and we'll be done. And this looks just about perfect. So let's go ahead and get it into a casing. I want it to go relatively small diameter for this sausage. So I'm using a 24, 26 millimeter sheep casing from the Sausage Maker. But you could use whatever casing you have on hand. If you want to make this, you know, a large format sausage, you could certainly do that. As far as the casings go, they've been soaking in a baking soda and water solution. And notice how I thread this particular sheep casing. I put my finger in it, dip it in the water a couple times to lubricate the inside of it, and then I just string it right on that horn. And that's it. If you got any questions about that, leave them in the comment section below. But now that that casing's on the horn, let's get our sausage stuffer ready so that we can get these sausages stuffed and then cooked. Our sausages are officially done. And notice how our Swiss cheese that we added has melted all inside that sausage. But because we didn't prick our sheep casing, it didn't ooze out all over the place. And that was kind of the goal for this particular sausage. I think that's going to be incredible. All right, so let's go ahead and get our Reuben sausage built. We've got our dressing. We've got our freshly made sauerkraut we made two, three weeks ago. And then I had my baker bake me up some rye buns. They've got a touch of caraway in it. They smell amazing. And I've just lightly toasted these buns to bring out some of that beautiful aroma, soften them up a little bit. And let's go ahead and build our Reuben. Now you could use Thousand Island dressing for your Reuben. You could also use Russian dressing, which is more traditional. We've got our corned beef and Swiss cheese sausage. And then we're going to top it off with our homemade kraut. There is our Reuben sausage. It is time to give this sausage a go. And I am loving the way this looks. All of the elements of that classic sandwich, but in the form of a sausage smells amazing. Let's just give it a taste. Wow. That is bursting with flavor. Okay. That's a lot to process. So let me begin by saying it tastes exactly like a Reuben sandwich, but better. The corned beef is super tender, super juicy. You know, couple that with the tangy homemade sauerkraut and the freshly baked rye bread. You have got a match made in heaven. So let's just go ahead and cut open a sausage and give it a taste by itself. Okay, here we go. Let's just give this sausage a taste and see what it's all about. Very juicy, very tender. Tastes exactly like corned beef. I don't find any one particular spice to be too overwhelming, but corned beef is known for having some pretty bold flavors, some pretty bold spices in it. I think I maybe would prefer a slightly larger diameter grind next time we used a six millimeter and I'm finding it a little too finely ground. So I'm thinking next time I'll do maybe a 10 millimeter or something like that with a slightly bigger casing. I did want to try to keep it pork less, but maybe next time I'll do like a, you know, 32, 34 millimeter hall casing with this filling and see how it turns out. As far as the cheese goes, very creamy mouthfeel. Great addition to this sausage. We added about 10% cheese and I think that was just about perfect. One thing to consider if you're not into corned beef, but you're into pastrami, you can always take these and smoke it and you're going to have your pastrami sausage. There you have it folks. That's what I've got for you today. If you have any questions about the Reuben sausage, leave them in the comment section below. And if you like this video or got anything out of it, a thumbs up would be helpful. If you're new to our channel and you want to immediately level up your sausage making game, hit that subscribe button and that notification bell as fast as you can. Thanks a lot for watching. We'll see you next week. Bye-bye.