Anyone have a good idea on how to work with bulk raw sausage without the mess on the hands? We went from raw to pre-cooked for a short time, which was great, scoop and sprinkle, but for a GOOD tasting one we’re hitting $4 a pound now! While GREAT raw sausage is only $1.68 from my vendors. So we have got to go back to raw.
Raw just takes so much more time and creates such a mess on the hands… I was suggested to cook a large portion, covered in the oven for a short term to get it stiffened up. Then put it in a food processor for a few seconds to dice it. But this creates crumbles and huge pieces.
What other things do you guys suggest? I’m in the Chicago area so sausage is huge here.
hey neighbor! where in Chicago are ya? We have a hand washing sink by our pizza guys so they can clean up after depositing raw sausage… you can always pre-cook your own sausage just deposit it onto a hotel pan and throw it in an oven.
we precook our raw sausage put it in a pan and run once through the oven covered. we cut it up in the pan with a dough scraper by pounding on it gets nice small pieces
Hmm,
about the only thing I can offer is to stay with fresh, and have a handwash sink on the line.
Although probably frowned upon by the regulating agencies, You may be able to use a bucket of bleach water (100-200 PPM) on the line and a towel in it, it will need to be changed often though.
we take bulk raw and make loaves so that we can slice in our robot coupe after it has cooled…pieces are a bit bigger than pepperoni and the coverage make the cost a no brainer and speed to apply is super fast
I prefer the raw sausage as well but we precook it for cross contamination purposes. We sell a ton of sausage and having to wash your hands every time sausage is used would be tough during a rush.
We take our raw sausage and drop it into a deep skillet filled with water heated to boiling. Pinch it off like its going on a pizza, one 5 lb batch takes about 1.5 hrs to do this, in about 3 batches. Once cooked, scooped out with a slotted spoon into a strainer, and cooled before putting into a plastic zip storage bag. The last batch is pretty much swimming in all the fat that has cooked off. This last 1/3 of cooked sausage is run quickly under hot water to rinse off that extra grease, and allowed to drip and cool before adding to the zip bag, which we store either back into the freezer or in the cooler depending upon where we are in rotation. (we also grill our own chicken so that we have the quality of product we need for our pizza – we reserve the drippings from the chicken and use it as our base for making soups!)
One of the biggest complaints our customers had to our previous owners product was its was way too greasy (they also complained of the cardboard crust – the previous owners bought pre-made frozen dough balls - YUCK!). So with this process we’ve eliminated the grease. AND this tastes so much better than the pre-cooked we were buying from the wholesale food distributors.
I know, time is money, but this time I put in ensures I can make a quality product without the extra expense.