Homemade Soy Sausage

Why, you may be asking yourselves, is this wild, omnivorous mountain woman who eats smoked raccoon and bear brats for breakfast posting a recipe for soy sausage? Well, dear readers, I will tell you that it is because this soy sausage is REALLY good, and because I fell in love with a vegetarian mountain man. Wanting to impress him and make the best mountain man breakfasts possible, I naturally decided the processed breakfast patties were something I could figure out from scratch, and turned to an old favorite, The New Farm Vegetarian Cookbook for help. This is one of the cookbooks I have had the longest, and in my opinion is about as do-it-yourself from scratch as you can get with vegetarian cooking. And it’s got a hell of a story. If you have never heard of Ina May and Stephen Gaskin, and their schoolbus voyage across the country in the early seventies when they founded a commune in Tennessee called The Farm, and made groundbreaking strides in midwifery and natural childbirth, you are missing out. The New Farm Vegetarian Cookbook and Spiritual Midwifery are two books I will never be without on my shelves. But I digress…

Their recipe for soy sausage in the book looked a bit complicated at first glance because they were all about pressure cooking the soybeans and the final product using tin cans for molds. I have to confess that I am a bit skittish around my pressure cooker, and often choose canning recipes that involve hot water baths. I also tend to crock pot beans or do long soaks and cooking times rather than pressure cook them. I can rationalize that the likelihood of my pressure cooker exploding on my stove top is very low, but when it comes down to it, I still avoid it. I was not so sure about steaming in tin cans and then having to un-mold them, and didn’t know if any metals would leach into the final product. I also happened to be low on tin cans in my recycling. I got creative and simply did my overnight soaking and two hour simmering for the beans, which I thought came out adequately soft, and tracked down some taro leaves from the Asian food market to wrap and steam the logs of soy sausage on the stove top. I figured humans have been steaming foods wrapped up in various leaves for hundreds of years, so I could do this without the tin cans.

I was amazed at how easily the recipe went together once the soybeans were cooked and slightly mashed with my wooden kraut pounder. Basically all the other ingredients were just mixed in to make a gooey mash that smelled just like delicious, savory sausage.

Then I unwrapped the taro leaves and formed little soy sausage rolls which I wrapped up in leafy packages.

This worked well enough, but became a bit problematic and messy after the 1 1/2 hours of steaming when the leaves disintegrated on the outside of the soy sausage logs and had to be scraped off.

The last time I made it, I was short one leaf, and decided to experiment with a piece of cheese cloth. It behaved beautifully, and I decided that is what I will be using from now on. I had to discard the piece of cheesecloth when I was done, but it was a very small piece, wasn’t messy and unwrapped smoothly.

Here is what the soy sausage logs come out looking like when they’re done steaming. These aren’t exactly pretty to look at, due to the residual taro leaves, but they have a great texture and hold together beautifully.

Another lesson I learned was to slice before freezing. I often make a triple or quadruple batch so we have enough for a few months, and made the mistake of freezing them in solid logs and trying to slice them up frozen. This didn’t work very well, so pre-slicing was the way to go this time around. Then I simply wrapped each log in waxed paper and froze them in freezer bags. The slices can be taken out and pan fried to a good crispy state right out of the freezer, and they can also be thawed and crumbled to add into recipes. This soy sausage is excellent in county gravy over biscuits.

Here is the recipe, and hopefully these tips from my trial and error are helpful for folks wanting to try their hand at homemade soy sausage. All in all, it’s easy.

The Farm “Soysage”

4 cups cooked cracked soybeans or soy pulp leftover from making soy milk

2 cups whole wheat flour

1 cup wheat germ

3/4 cup oil

1 1/4 cup soymilk (or other liquid)

1 cup nutritional yeast flakes

1/4 cup soy sauce

1 1/2 tsp fennel seed

1 tsp black pepper

3 tsp oregano

2 tsp allspice

2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp cayenne

1 tsp sage (my addition)

2 Tbsp brown sugar

2 Tbsp garlic powder

2 Tbsp wet mustard

Mix ingredients. Form into logs and wrap in cheesecloth or taro leaves, or pack into oiled tin cans. Steam in steamer basket for 1 1/2 hours, making sure to check and add water since it’s a long steam time. You can also pressure cook in 5 cups water for 30 minutes instead. Let cool, then slice and enjoy!