Useful Books About Sausage Making (Sausage or Salami)

If you search for the best book on sausage making, you will find a lot of books about this topic on Google, the good old algorithm. However, you want the best of the best. One answer that will give you that answer is someone who actually reads them, crazy!

I want to make sure you’re getting the best book if you’re starting out.

The question is whether you’ll be making salamis (dry curing), or fresh sausages which are cooked and fried.

I have made a lot of sausages and salamis. Early on, I used these books to figure out the ins and outs. Now, after many years all this knowledge starts to slightly overlap across the topics.

To create something universal I put together this website eat cured meat to come up with the median across the variations that exist in this delicious craft.

The best book for fresh sausage making is Great Sausage Recipes and Meat Curing by Rytek Kutas. The best book for fresh, fermented, emulsified or dried sausage and salami is Home Production of Quality Meats and Sausages by Stanley Marianski & Adam Stanley Marianski.

That is the short answer. Now a little more details about these books, why I consider ‘these the best’!

Best Books about Fresh Sausage Making

It depends on whether you want just sausage or salami. Both these books are incredibly comprehensive but overlap in some regards with cured meats, covered in both.

The Rytek Kutas book covers sausages (fresh) and meat curing.

The Marianski book covers more meat science and includes some more modern techniques.

Great Sausage Recipes and Meat Curing

Published 1984 – Rytek Kutas

This book will cover every aspect of making sausages and give ideas around variations, whether the sausages will be smoked or not smoked, or even how they’re dried (preserving/curing type of sausage).

It has more focus on home domestic sausage making and this is probably one of the differences between these 2 books.

Marianski’s book has more of an angle toward commercial production and covers meat food science, as well. This still completely relates to at-home production, but it’s also a bit like a textbook.

If you have never stuffed sausages before, Kutas’s book is a great beginner’s book and probably less intimidating than the Marianski book, which I believe is much more detailed.

Being an older released book it offers measurements in imperial and volume terms.

This is not ideal since the modern techniques of equilibrium curing and brining rely more upon the accuracy of weight using the metric systems for precise numbers, you just need a decent accurate scale.

A teaspoon of one type of salt compared to a teaspoon of another can lead to very different outcomes due to volume being equal but weight is actually different. Hence, why metric is superior to the imperial for these calculations.

And that is why volume measurements with teaspoons or tablespoons are not ideal.

Best Book about Salami & Sausage Making

Home Production of Quality Meats and Sausages

Published 2022 S A Marianski

If there were one textbook/reference book for Sausage and Salami making – this would be it.

It is so comprehensive in terms of the science behind different aspects of making sausages and fermenting them, it’s the complete package.

It’s not an inspirational book, I think. The authors S A Marianski have done really well, considering English is their second language. That does not lessen the importance of the content and detail that you get from the book.

They have written about a dozen books on the topic of sausages. Amongst other recipes, you will find a sophisticated vegetable sausage with black rice and pistachio. One can see the ingredients inside the sausage, rather than the plant-based sausages that look like meat sausages. These are the early developments in this niche.

They do hundreds of recipes like blood sausage, liver sausage or crazy Thai’s exotic sausage, and so on. The idea the Marianski’s have is that you use some of these recipes as a base and adjust them according to your own interpretation.

You know the old saying: cooking is all about your interpretation. This means putting your spin on your creation.

Fresh sausage making is relatively straightforward because you’re making a meat patty with salt and spices and stuffing it into the natural or artificial casing. Getting consistency is key – also known as the ‘bind’.

The Marianski book shows all the science behind dry-cured, semi-dry cured meats and all the other variations of cured meats that the Western World has never heard of. Plus covers ham in detail.

They did not just write about the amazing Eastern European ideas, they also explored some Asian & African cultures for salami (here is a link to the category on this site about salami) and fresh sausages where this exotic mix gives a whole new layer of flavor ideas.

There is a section in this book I’ve not seen covered anywhere else, which is warm smoking. Across the United States, people are a little bit shy of this technique since you’re working within the danger zone of bacterial growth – temperature somewhere between 60°F\15°C to hundred and 140°F\60°C.

There is less bacterial growth at this temperature when you’re using acidity, salt, nitrates/nitrites, smoke, and a controlled environment, this means you can warm smoke in the zone – if the process is accurate.

Anyway, for someone who’s doing whole muscle meat curing, fresh sausages, and smoking tons of different meats for 15 years – learning about a whole new area like warm smoking is pretty phenomenal.

So, either book works, so go get them!