Mariner's bologna

As a child I was never a great fan of bologna, but I could eat it without gagging. It wasn't that I disliked the flavor, or even that we had it so terribly often that I grew tired of it — in fact, although we had bologna more often than other cold cuts, we rarely ate cold cuts at all. It just never inspired any great desire in me, and this response continued pretty much into full adulthood. This all changed while I was visiting my sister this past summer.

Now I was raised in the Southern United States, and in "the South" we don't have much of a tradition regarding the "neighborhood delicatessen". They just didn't exist in most places where I lived, while I was growing up. My sister, Teri, however moved 'way up North as a very young bride, and only visits the Old South on certain special occasions. In the Northern states, they do have — and have pretty much always had - traditions concerning the neighborhood delicatessens. Teri has been there long enough now to become steeped in many Northern traditions, including patronizing the neighborhood deli (some here call it "becoming Yankeefied", but we love her anyway!).

So, while we were visiting this summer, my brother-in-law, Dan, decided that I needed to try out his favorite "ring bologna", made on-site at a particular deli/butcher shop. Now most Southerners don't have much exposure to ring bologna. They might have heard of it in passing, but probably have never seen it (other than maybe in pictures), and my first look at it didn't register much except "looks like a kielbasa that someone forgot to smoke." I tried it out though, along with a little horseradish sauce (also recommended by Dan) and was pleasantly surprised at the taste. The meat mix was noticeably more granular than typical commercial bologna, and you could actually taste the meat in it! Good tip, Dan!

Anyway, as you can tell, I liked it, but about the only way you would ever be able to find it anywhere in the South is to travel long distances away from home, or purchase it mail-order (or online). Neither of those options appeal to me, so — since I'm already "experienced" at making other home-made cold cuts — I decided to try to make my own bologna.

Surprisingly, the Internet provides a plethora of recipes for home-made bologna, and even more surprisingly, most of them are fairly simple! So, after harvesting as much info as I could, concerning customary types and amounts of ingredients, as well as appropriate cooking techniques, I have formulated my own recipe for an all-beef bologna.

To me, stuffing casings with an experimental meat mix represents an unnecessary investment of labor and materials, and it messes up another whole set of equipment, so I decided not to make a "ring" out of it — I just wanted to see if I could get a good meat mix. Maybe next time I'll try stuffing casings in a few different sizes and shapes.

Ingredients:

Lean ground beef (90/10)	1362 g	3 lb
Cold Water	230 ml	1 cup
Morton Tender Quick® Home Meat Cure	42 g	3 Tbs*
Non-fat dry milk	28 g	1 oz.
Liquid Smoke, Colgin® Original Recipe Natural Hickory	7 ml	1½ tsp
Coriander (ground)	2 g	1 tsp
Black Pepper (ground))	1.5 g	½ tsp
Onion powder	1.2 g	½ tsp
Garlic (granulated)	0.8 g	¼ tsp

*Morton recommends 1 Tbs Tender Quick per pound of meat

Directions:

Wash your hands thoroughly and mix all ingredients thoroughly by hand, using a large, chilled, clean bowl. Cover the meat mix and refrigerate overnight, allowing the seasonings to more fully infuse the mix.

Optionally, to get even better distribution of the seasonings, and a somewhat smoother texture, regrind the chilled, infused meat mix using a ⅛" (3 mm) grinding plate. If your objective is to duplicate the texture of bologna produced by the national-brand meat packers, you'll have to emulsify the meat, using a food processor.

Choose clean, dry loaf moulds of your preferred size and shape. Line the moulds with food-grade
plastic wrap, and pack with the meat mix.

Bake at 190° F (88° C) in a preheated oven until the internal temperature reaches 160° F (71° C). Depending on the number, size, and shape of your loaves, this can require from 2½ to 5 hours.


Chill the moulds containing the fully-cooked loaves in an ice water bath until cooled to room temperature; then refrigerate them overnight, or until the bologna is completely chilled (35-40° F or 2-5° C).

Decant and slice the loaves to your desired thickness for sandwiches.










Note: The only "real" chemical additives in this recipe are those contained in the Morton® Tender Quick Home Meat Cure. Literature research shows that Tender Quick is about 70% salt (NaCl), 29% sugar, ½% sodium nitrate (NaNO3), and ½% sodium Nitrite (NaNO2). While all of these substances contribute significantly to preserving the final product, it is only prudent to properly refrigerate it while awaiting its use; and common wisdom holds that any unused portion remaining after three days (following the cooking step) should be frozen.

Discussion:

Ground Beef - Buy or Grind Your Own?

Some "purists" (myself often among them) would maintain that if you want to achieve the best reasonable quality, you have to grind your own meat. I often do, especially with pork - not so much with beef. If you do decide to grind your own meat, remember to remove any silverskin before grinding, and make at least two passes through the grinder, the first time with a ¼" (6 mm) plate, then a second time with a ³⁄₁₆" (4.5 mm) plate.

Frankly, since I was able to buy 90/10 ground beef at $2.98 USD per pound, and pretty much any beef roast was going for at least another $1.00 more per pound, I was more than happy to avoid both the additional cost and the additional work!

If you simply must grind meat for yourself, you have a few, limited options. You can:

• accept whatever ratio of lean to fat is present in the cuts you are grinding (which is what most of us, myself included, would do);
• trim the fat from your cuts as best you can, and try (or don't!) to come up with a reliable way to measure the amount of fat remaining;
• use a mix of cuts with generally accepted values of fat content. Using data from "Nutrition Facts", it appears that a mix of 2.1 lb (954 g) of beef round with 0.9 lb (408 g) of beef chuck, ground together would result in a meat mix with about 10% fat. As odd as these numbers may seem, if one were making a 10 lb batch instead of a 3 lb batch, the same ratios would require 7 lb ( about 3.2 kg) of round and 3 lb (about 1.4 kg) of chuck.

Regrinding

Since I had a sufficient number of loaf moulds available, I opted to regrind only 2 lb out of the 3 lb of the meat mix, just to see what difference it made in the final product.

Loaf Moulds

There are only a few real requirements for loaf moulds:

1. They need to be oven-safe (at least up to 200° F, or 93.3° C);
2. They need to be food-grade (meaning that using them won't contaminate food); and
3. They need to be the right size and shape (which is the cook's decision).

For this effort, I decided that it would be convenient to make loaves weighing about one pound (1 lb) each, so I looked around for suitable containers that would hold that much. 

Now it happens that, among other things, we also frequently make home made hummus, which means that, periodically, we buy sesame tahini. This is relevant because the tahini we buy comes in metal cans, labelled as containing 15 oz of product. For the math-challenged, that is only 1 oz short of a full pound, and tahini (being a slurry containing a lot of oil) weighs significantly less than an equal volume of meat. Empirical testing showed that the 15 oz tahini can easily holds a full pound of meat, and then some. It also happens that the diameter of these cans, while smaller than is ideal for sandwich meats, is still within acceptable parameters.

So here we have a food-grade, metal container (it came with food in it, after all) of acceptable size and shape, that will hold the right amount of our meat mix (a little more than 1 lb), and that was processed in a cannery of some sort (obviously safe up to food processing temperatures). And best of all, it didn't cost anything more than the effort required to wash and dry it! All of this means that I (or you!) don't have to break the bank for the"right" mould at some fancy kitchen shop or foreign online store - just find something you already have, that fits the requirements.

The Love of My Life, being a packrat of sorts, just happened to have several of these tahini containers, already cleaned, dried, available; so I was set.

Cooking

To do the actual cooking, I used our Rival® model #R0180BR-C roaster oven, as described in my Olive Loaf post, and I continuously monitored the cooking temperature with a digital probe oven thermometer. The roaster oven easily achieved and maintained the target baking temperature of 190° F (88° C); and I observed that the internal temperature of the meat reached the targeted 160° F (71° C) after about 2½ hours of cook time. I held the loaf at that temperature for about 15 minutes before removing the moulds from heat and chilling them in an ice water bath.

Product Evaluation

When the bologna had chilled sufficiently, I sliced about 1 oz each from the un-reground loaf, and one of the reground loaves. Both loaves sliced easily and cleanly, so I would expect that making sandwich slices would not be difficult. We taste-tested both types of loaf (a) solo, (b) with a very small dollop of horseradish sauce, and (c) with horseradish sauce and a cracker.

Both loaves have a flavor reminiscent of a really good all-beef frank. The un-reground loaf, as expected had a somewhat coarser texture, and with a different seasoning mix could probably pass for a very lean salami; but surprisingly, it had a much milder flavor than the reground loaf. We found that we preferred the reground loaf, but that the un-reground version was perfectly acceptable in terms of texture and flavor.

The milder flavor of the un-reground loaf might be due to slightly less-than-optimal distribution of the spices and Tender Quick. Simply allowing the coarser product to "age" somewhat longer under refrigeration may cause this to self-correct.

Conclusion

Overall, I'm very satisfied with the outcome of this project, and will doubtless be making my own bologna fairly often.