Eugene “Matze” Matzenbacher (left) and Ron Whelan carefully measure spice ingredients for each batch of sausage. (Alan Dooley photos)

There’s both an art and science that go into making tasty sausage, and it requires no small amount of manpower.

All three ingredients come together in a Matzenbacher family tradition annually here in Monroe County, as they did again this past weekend.

About 30 family members of the Matzenbacher clan gathered to make some 1,500 pounds of summer and deer sausage.

The Matzenbachers are like several families in the area who join together each year for this time-honored tradition.

Their longstanding family recipe included 1,000 pounds of pork and 500 more pounds of beef and deer meat. The pork and beef become summer sausage. Pork and venison make up the deer sausage.

In addition, there’s a family blend of spices, including salt, Morton sugar cure salt, pepper, garlic and mustard seed.
Eugene “Matze” Matzenbacher served as the group’s senior representative. He also took the lead in procuring the ingredients.

Matze also headed up the preparation of spices necessary to adjust the final taste of the sausages, setting precise mixes on a digital scale. He noted that at least one spice has more than doubled in price recently.

“Pepper was $6 a pound two years ago,” he said. “This year it is $14 for the same amount.”

The first step is cutting meat from the bones. This is both labor intensive and requires very sharp knives. Two tables surrounded by more than a dozen people were engaged in this work when the Republic-Times arrived to observe the process.

The meat pieces are then cut into small fist-sized pieces and dropped into wash tubs for movement to the grinder.  There, the meat is pushed through the grinder and extruded into a compacted round bundle of meat “cords.”

From there, the ground meat is dumped into a large tub mixer, where some water is added to increase the meat’s pliability and spices are added in.

Some want more of a specific spice, and Matze has seen to it that their taste-specific desires are factored in.

Once all ingredients are mixed, it’s time to make the actual sausage – large casings for larger sausages to be sliced for eating and smaller casings for sausage links.

The operation included three sausage-stuffing machines – two manually cranked and another compressed air-powered sausage stuffing machine made by a family member. Each squeezes the ground meat and spices into sausage casings, which are either cut or tied with twine.

“We’ll smoke the sausage,” Matze reported.

It will get smoked for 50 hours. Then it must be cured.

“Depending on the product, that can take two weeks for the smaller sausage smokies and up to five to six weeks for the larger ones,” he said.

The sausage will be distributed to family members, in the amount and specific seasoning they have requested, and in the end, Matze will be reimbursed for the initial investment.

“I remember doing this as a youngster,” Matze reminisced.

It was already a family tradition by that point.

When asked if his wife Babe would be there, he replied, “This is a men’s activity.”  Then he looked around the barn-sausage making facility, and noting several young ladies hard at work in various phases of the operation, he smiled and said, “But that’s changing in this day and age.”

Asked how they select this time of the year for this process, Matze said the varying temperatures in mid-to-late February help the curing.

“My dad always advised that sausage should be made around Lincoln’s birthday,” he said.

A final ingredient added at each step was a readily apparent portion of family love and joy.

The social aspect of sausage making was well evident, as conversations across the age spectrum, from older adults to children, ebbed and flowed.

This event was more than just making sausage. It was an annual renewal of the family.

And the sausage will no doubt taste delicious.