Natural Beef Casings
Beef casings can be confusing due to the varied types of casings available: Beef Rounds, Middles, and bungs. It is not the prettiest terminology, but that is the world of sausage making! These animals don't just provide us with their meat; we use the hides for leather products, fat (or 'tallow') for soaps, candles, and lubricants, bones are ground for fertilizers and bone meal for animal feed, and the intestines and stomachs are used for casings. Beef Casings vary the greatest from their smallest diameter, 1 3/8" (35-38mm), to the largest 5" (114-127mm) Beef Bung.
These can be a bit confusing, so let's get into it.
Beef Rounds:
Beef Rounds (sometimes called "Runners") have a wide variety of uses, but are some of the most distinctive and unique casings you will come across. Beef Rounds have a natural, defined curve, allowing them to curl into a ring while stuffing. These casings are perfect for large loops, and do not make a good rope (think salami) or linked sausages.
Sizes Available:
35-38mm, 38-40mm, 40-43mm, and 43-46mm Beef Rounds are all used to make ring bologna, boudin, blood sausage, liver sausage, ring polish sausage, and more!
Beef Middles:
A fairly thick-walled casing that is perfect for making sopressata, bologna, or can be used for making consistently sized straight-tubed sausages like salamis. These are the most common casings used for dry curing because they're resilient to stuffing pressure, they're the most common salami diameters, and they adhere and shrink with the sausage as it dries over time.
Sizes Available:
55-60mm, 60-65mm
Beef Bung:
The most unfortunate, misleading name for a casing, the "Bung," is not the final stretch of intestines. It is more closely related to an appendix. They also have a capped end, meaning one end is naturally closed, like a tube sock. Fun and Gross Fact: Rytek Kutas, founder of The Sausage Maker and author of "Great Sausage Recipes and Meat Curing", used to blow them up like a balloon to stretch them before stuffing to make a larger final product and test the integrity/quality of the casing (not recommended!). They're great for making large-diameter sausages and salamis, such as capicola, veal sausage, bologna, and cooked salami.
Sizes Available:
89-102mm, 102-114mm, 114-127mm
IMPORTANT: Beef Casings tend to be denser and less pleasant to chew. They are typically peeled after cooking and, for that reason, are considered inedible. Casings should be flushed inside and out with cold water, rinsed thoroughly and soaked in water for at least 2-3 hours before use.
