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 enlarge | Authors: Bruce Aidells, Denis Kelly
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Category: Book
List Price: $21.95
Buy New: $14.75
You Save: $7.20 (33%)
New (15) Used (13) Collectible (1) from $13.03
Avg. Customer Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 34748
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 314
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 7.3 x 1
ISBN: 1580081592
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.66
UPC: 028195081598
EAN: 9781580081597
ASIN: 1580081592
Publication Date: November 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 encyclopedic, but not a good first book on the subject June 13, 2006
3 out of 10 found this review helpful
This is a long and detailed book. I picked it up with another volume (Kobler's "Making Great Sausage") an thought Aidells' book was the less useful of the two.
 Looks Pretty, Tastes Bland January 13, 2006
6 out of 9 found this review helpful
I have used this cookbook now for six months or so. The book looks very nice and has some good pointers on grinding, making and stuffing sausage. I have tried a number of the fresh sausage recipes (mostly pork). The breakfast sausage recipe is really pretty good, although probably too hot for your average breakfast palatte (and I like hot food, works great for gravy though). A number of the other sausage recipes seem very bland (especially the Italian recipes, both sweet and hot). I was actually pretty amazed by this in that Aidell's is a premium brand of sausage.
 Excellent Source on Fresh Sausage. Buy It! January 2, 2006
30 out of 31 found this review helpful
`Bruce Aidells' Complete Sausage Book' by meat and sausage experts Aidells and Denis Kelly is the third book by Aidells I have reviewed and it easily maintains the consistently high quality I have come to expect from this writing team on the subject of meat. Along with the team of Schlesinger and Willoughby, they seem to be the reigning kings among culinary writers on the subject of meat, more especially on the subject of pork and sausage.
For starters, I strongly recommend this book for all people interested in reading about food and in cooking, even if you have no interest in making sausage yourself. In many ways, it is as good as the recently published book `Charcuterie' by the team of culinary journalist Michael Ruhlman and charcuterie expert and chef, Brian Poleyn, if only because Aidells and Kelly are better at staying focused on their primary topic. `Charcuterie' is very good, but if what you really want to know about is sausage, Aidells and Kelly are much better.
One thing these two books do for me is to completely reassess my opinion of Emeril Lagasse and his `Pork Fat Rules' mantra. It is so easy to take this as bluster, yet both books in one voice say that pork fat is the cream of the crop when it comes to animal fats. Beef suet is too grainy and chicken fat melts at too low a temperature to be useful for a lot of cooking applications for which pork fat is so good.
It is important to note that while this book does touch on the subjects of smoked and cured sausages, its primary subject by far is fresh sausage that you can make at home. Next to the affirmation of pork fat, I was most pleasantly surprised by the great variety of fresh sausage recipes and in the antiquity of so many of these varieties. It is easy to believe that hot and sweet Italian sausage and German bratwurst and Spanish chorizo and Polish Kielbasa have been around a long time and it is not unexpected to find that the Cajun specialties boudin and andouille are pretty old. However, it is surprising to find that ingredients such as apples and dried tomatoes are not modern foodie concoctions, but easily as old as fennel and garlic as sausage ingredients.
Another major epiphany I take from this book is the fact that along with pasta, canned tomatoes, olive oil, onions, garlic, parsley, anchovies, eggs, flour, milk and capers, sausage is one of the most versatile items one can have on hand in your pantry, as it can be used as a flavorful addition to a really wide variety of dishes. The only caveat is that fresh sausage must be frozen in order to keep it safe and it's frozen shelf life may not be much more than two months. Even so, this book will give you more than enough good ideas for using that sausage to keep you from forgetting about the stash of charcuterie goodness.
The book is divided up by three major topics. The first and shortest is on basic fresh sausage making techniques and the methods for hot and cold smoking fresh sausage. Even if you never use these techniques, the interested foodie should really know how these techniques work and what they do, so you are in a better position to make the best use of products of these two techniques. My biggest criticism with this book comes in this section which would have been much better done with a few good diagrams of various types of smoking devices. Most of this material would have been harder for me to appreciate had I not seen Alton Brown's popular `Good Eats' parody of `Iron Chef' where he cold smokes bacon with one of his typically McGyveresque contraptions.
The authors make simple sausage making sound easy, and with the right precautions, it really is. All you really need to convince yourself of this fact is to realize it is not much more than making meatloaf. The main concerns come with the care and sanitation involved in grinding the meat, as a dirty meat grinder is an open invitation to unwanted microbial beasties. And, while the book supplies sources for sausage making tools, I suggest you do the Martha Stewart routine of searching out tag sales for solid metal meat grinders you can probably get for a song.
The second major section covers recipes for making a wide variety of sausages. The chapters within this part cover:
American Sausages:
American Farmhouse Sausage with 10 recipes, including smoked sausage and chicken and apple sausage.
Southern Sausages with 9 recipes, including Boudin, Andouille, Chaurice, Tasso, and Pickled Pork.
Midwestern Sausages with 14 recipes influenced by Germany, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe.
Southwestern Sausages with 6 recipes influenced by Spain, including chorizo and poultry sausage.
Mediterranean Sausages with 13 recipes including Italian, Spanish, and Greek sausages.
Asian Style Sausages with 5 recipes including mushrooms, chicken, and shrimp.
Game and Seafood sausages with 12 recipes including salmon, duck, crawfish, buffalo, and venison.
The third major section (Part II) covers recipes for using sausage in dishes. Recipes are organized in ten (10) chapters on:
Breakfast All Day
Sausage Starters: Appetizers and Salads
Sausage Based Soups
Sausage Sandwiches and Pizzas
Lotta Pasta (and Sausage)
Better Beans and Grains
Sausage with Fish and Seafood
Cacklers and Gobblers: Poultry and Sausages
Red Meat and Sausage
Sausage Spiked Side Dishes
This is more than enough evidence to convince me to have sausage on hand on a regular basis. And, one piece of very good news is the fact that nitrites in sausage are no longer considered a health risk and by making your own sausage, you can avoid almost all the unwanted chemicals put into commercial sausage.
This is a foodie `must have' book!
Good Eats September 12, 2005
This book is both interesting to read and informative to those that desire to attempt to create good food rather than just but it. It is documented well with creatively laid out recipes and has a page in the back listing mail-order sources for herbs and spices as well as sources for sausages and specialty meats.
It is worth the price as a resource guide and a good read for food lovers.
 Really Good Sausage Recipes October 25, 2004
14 out of 15 found this review helpful
The word "complete" is because this cookbook shows you both how to make sausages, and then how to cook with them. I liked the sausage making recipes, but was not very impressed with the sausage cooking section.
This book is really 2 different books in one, so I will describe them separately. The first part, which is the first 100 pages, is full of wonderful, useful, and very rare recipes for making fresh or cured sausages. The second part is 200 pages is a pretty standard collection of recipes that use sausages, which I am less enthusiastic about.
The first 20 pages of the sausage making section supplies information for making and curing sausages. The rest of the section has individual recipes for many different types of sausages. It has sections on: country style, southern, german / east european, southwest, mediterranean, asian, game, and seafood. You quickly learn that despite their variety, sausages are really just ground meat with many seasonings (getting the texture just right and fighting with the meat grinder is a different story). The only difficulty with this part is the necessity of a meat grinder; in most cases, you cannot use a food processor. The other problem is getting the sausages casings; you can just make them in bulk (which is how I usually use them, as I am too lazy to go through the trouble of stuffing them into casings), or go to a local, old fashion meat butcher and get them there.
The recipe section is a little less interesting. It has: breakfast, appetizers, soup, sandwich, pasta, grains, seafood, poultry, meat, and sides. The quality of the recipes is OK, but not exceptional (sort of like the recipes in those magazines in the check-out lines at the grocery store). The recipe section is a moderately useful section, since you can use store bought varieties of sausages. The problem here is that the recipes are arranged in standard fashion; organizing according to the sausage they use would have been more helpful. That way, if you have some sausage sitting in the refrigerator or freezer, it would be easier to find a recipe that uses them.
Some of the page references are wrong.
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