Turkey Sausages

It's the day after Thanksgiving and not a creature is stirring. At least, not in the kitchen. Everything is pretty much ready to go. The sausages were made from the wings and thighs when the turkey was boned. We did make some garlic mashed potatoes and pita bread, but that stuff is easy.

Turkey sausages
ingredients

• Dark turkey meat, silver skin removed.
• Powdered milk (binder)
• Minced celery & parsley
• Lemon juice
• A bit of cider vinegar
• Fresh cranberries
• Salt
• Black pepper
• Duck fat. Use a lot to keep the sausages from getting too dry. Pork fat could also work.
• A trace of sage

Instructions

1. Get everything really, really cold. If you're using a meat grinder, put it in ice water for a while to chill. 
2. Season the meat, mix everything together and run it through the grinder.
3. Make a small patty and fry it. Taste to adjust seasonings. Adjust the spice mix as needed
4. Stuff hog casings with the sausage mix.
5. Preferably, hang in the refrigerator to let the casings dry out a bit overnight. If you can't do this, no big deal.

Grill the sausages and enjoy. I cooked the pita bread on the grill, too. Fast and easy.

Stocking up at Oxbow Market

Oxbow Public Market interior

Step inside, your charcuterie awaits!

pancetta & friends, Fatted Calf

cured meats, Fatted Calf

margharita pizza ingredients, Ca'Momi

pizza napoletana, Ca'Momi

Where's the Urfa pepper? Yipes! That's all we've got left? How 'bout the Aleppo? Nope, not much of that, either. Is there any good ham? We could make some crepes to go with this French cider... Nope. Looks like it's time for a trip to the Oxbow Market in Napa.

Oxbow market sits next to the corpse of Copia, the failed food/wine/art/whatever museum/center/restaurant/garden. You even park in Copia's lot. I'm not really surprised that Copia failed, since it really didn't seem to know if it wanted to be an art museum, food exploration center, gathering place, cafeteria or restaurant. During the few times I visited, there didn't seem to be enough live food-related action. I went expecting cooking demonstrations, product showcases, lots of foodie stuff happening all around. I expected to be dazzled by all the activity, where little known ingredients would be explained, cooking processes shown off, the palate educated and new horizons discovered. Instead, I found an interesting restaurant that I thought I'd try later (nope. gone), a cafeteria (a cafeteria in a center that should have all kinds of culinary sophistication?), an interesting garden, lots of static art and few active food demonstrations. Maybe other days were better; I went during the week. But still, a center like this needed to draw people all week long, from a large area, so where was the sizzle?

The sizzle is at Oxbow, though. There are numerous restaurants, a place to buy interesting (and expensive) cheeses, a purveyor of florescent cupcakes, a butcher, a fish market, a produce stand, a bakery... There are some puzzling places, like antique stores with expensive culinary artifacts. Nothing edible as far as I could tell. There's a place with lots of tables, all occupied by people sitting behind their portable computers. A tea shop. An olive oil store. Lots of little restaurants: Mexican, Venezuelan, Undefined multi-cultural, Italian, burgers, oysters. Ice cream. None of this was my reason for going. I was there for some charcuterie from the Fatted Calf and some spices from Whole Spice. Too bad that Copia can't be reconfigured somehow to interface with Oxbow to create a gastronomic destination worthy of Napa.

Fatted Calf, unlike the salumeria in the Ferry Building, has more of a French approach to cured meats, although not exclusively so. This means they've got rillettes. They even have them in two options: duck or pork we took the duck). They have duck confit ready to take home and heat, covered in lots of tasty duck fat. There's foie gras (we'll take a slice...). Smoked ham (more slices, for the crepes). Pancetta (a chunk, please). Head cheese (a taste, offered by the house, a nice gesture). We skipped the fresh rabbit, duck, lamb, pork and other locally raised offerings. We were tempted by freshly made sandwiches, beef jerky, pâté... but resisted. You have to stop somewhere, after all.

Now, on to the next item: the chili powders. Chili urfa has a deep, almost coffee-like flavor, and isn't so hot that you can't use enough to taste it. Aleppo is hotter, but with a bit of tart chili flavor to round it out. The latter is my go-to chili for whenever I want a bit of heat in a dish. Urfa is for when I want something more complex and richly flavored, usually for Mexican or Middle Eastern dishes.

Whole Spice will let you buy things in bulk, and if you come in with an empty container of one of their spices, they'll refill it for you so you don't have to pay for the jar. So, Aleppo and Urfa peppers are back on the menu. Grab the chilis, pay, get out. Don't look around! I have to concentrate on what I came for in here lest I run up a huge bill with exotic spices I've never heard of and want to try.

There are a few quirky places. The coffee place is designed so that the person working there seems to always have her back to the customers. We stood a while, not sure if she was on the phone, preparing an order or both, shrugged and walked on. The ice cream shop had one bin of peanut flavored product, so I asked if there was a separate scoop for the nuts. "Uh... Well, I dunno... lemme see...". Wrong answer.

In the process, we tried a real Neapolitan pizza margherita at Ca'Momi, made with most of its ingredients imported from Italy, baked in a wood-fired oven. Type 00 flour, San Marzano tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella, even the salt came from Sicily. They must be a real foodie place, since instead of olive oil, they said "EVOO". Strangely enough, they didn't say if the oil was imported or not. To their credit, there's no chili flakes or Parmesan cheese, since these ingredients aren't used on veritable pizza napoletana. Even more to their credit, these things aren't necessary; the buffalo mozzarella melts in your mouth, nestled in an almost liquid San Marzano tomato sauce, punctuated by an occasional bite of fresh basil. They do have other pies, but this is the big test. With so few ingredients, everything must be perfect.

Goodies in hand, we headed back to the car, just as a new storm front rolled in from the West.

Farmer's market brunch

 

We finally got to our closest Certified Farmers' Market. The market just keeps getting better. There were cheeses, grass fed beef, pasture grown chickens, organic eggs, complex olive oils... and of course fruits and vegetables.

This coincides with one of us being on a low carb diet. Yes, she's the one who added the toast to the plate. Nice to know she's not restrictively serious about the whole diet thing.

Just about everything in this recipe came from the Farmers' Market. I wish the prosciutto had come from there, but so far nobody is making charcuterie for the market...

Farmers' Market Eggs

Ingredients (per person)

• 1 Orange cherry tomato (other tomatoes still not ready), chopped
• about 2 Green onions (scallions). Chives would work, too. Finely chopped. You'll use the green tips as a garnish, the bases for the Hollandaise and the frittata.
• 2 Organic cage free happy chicken eggs, whole for poaching and separated for sauce and frittata.
• Salt to taste
• Foggy Morning cheese from the Nicasio Valley Cheese, sliced into 1/4" thick rounds
• Chicken stock - about 1/2 cup or so
• White wine vinegar - for the Hollandaise and the water for the poached eggs
• Prosciutto, cut into narrow strips, about one piece (slice)

Process

Overall
The goal is to time all this so that everything goes together hot and is whisked out for everyone to enjoy. You either have to prepare some things in advance or juggle several processes at once. I tend to make the Hollandaise a bit in advance since a quick whisking will restore it to its former glory, within reason.

• Chop all ingredients that need chopping.
• Slice the cheese so it's ready
• Boil some water for the poached eggs.
• Fry the scallions for the sauce and some more with tomatoes for the frittata
• Let the pan for the Hollandaise cool down
• Do the frittata and poached eggs
• Finish the Hollandaise
• Assemble the thing

Hollandaise

1. Fry some of the scallions in some butter, when they're translucent add chicken stock and white wine vinegar (just a dash of the vinegar)
2. Add chicken stock and a bit of white wine vinegar (or white wine) and reduce to almost dry
3. Let the pan cool.
4. Whip in egg yolks over low heat or bain marie. Careful! If you don't use a bain marie, lift the pan off the heat... better read about this technique before you try it. I don't use a bain marie because it's a pain, but too much heat will break your sauce and you'll have to start over.
5. Add small cubes of room temperature butter, whisking constantly
6. Add lemon juice when sauce thickens, whisk in. 
7. Reserve sauce.

Frittata

1. Put some oil in a pan, slowly fry some more scallions and the tomatoes.
2. When they're a bit translucent, add the egg whites left over from the Hollandaise.
3. Put on very low heat and let set up while you're doing other things. 
4. When almost done, but still a bit liquid, turn off the heat and reserve. The eggs will cook on residual heat.

Poached eggs

1. Add some salt and white vinegar to the boiling water.
2. Stir the water, and add the eggs to the middle of the swirling water, one at a time. Drop them from just over the surface of the water so the yolks don't break.
3. Turn off the heat once the eggs are in, give them about three minutes. You want fully cooked whites with runny yolks (unless you have a different preference).

Assembly

1. Get your plates ready.
2. Make sure everyone is ready to eat and at the table, not walking around the garden gawking at flowers.
3. Place the cheese rounds on the plates
4. Place the hot frittata on the cheese
5. Carefully lean the two poached eggs on the frittata.
6. Pour the Hollandaise over the frittata, between the poached eggs
7. Add the prosciutto over the top
8. Add the green onion garnish (or chives).

Serve right away, preferably without taking lots of photos, so it will be warm. The frittata should melt the cheese a bit, and the Hollandaise will flow like lava, mixing with the cheese, the egg yolks, the frittata, the prosciutto... If you're the photographer, it's even good lukewarm. 

This was originally designed to be a low carb plate. If you want it that way, don't serve with toast. You really don't need the toast except to chase down that remaining cheese/frittata/sauce on the plate.

Cheap yet extravagant

On the way back from a meeting, we headed for our favorite hole in the wall Mexican joint for a burrito, but ended up passing Whole Paycheck just to see if they had anything irresistible. Result: we spent a bit too much on cheeses. Along with some other things. Only one solution: stretch out our purchases so we can get back to the cheap burrito index. That will mean a minimum of four meals.

Only one thing to do: compensate. Compensating with inexpensive ingredients does not mean choking down something in atonement for our fromage extravagance. Old bread (home made), eggs and butter are all cheap. Prosciutto isn't, but then this doesn't use much of it.

This uses a Hollandaise sauce made of shallots, white wine vinegar (also homemade) and limes to keep things moist and interesting. The bread is cut out into a round and gently simmered in butter after being lightly splashed with chicken stock. The bread scraps become croutons, same process (they'll crisp up again in the butter). Only two free-range brown organic eggs per person. One poached, the other in the Hollandaise. Eight eggs left in the under four dollar package. Damn cheap!

The prosciutto also gets cut into a circle, and the scraps get trimmed kind of like a chiffonade and used as a garnish.

Here's how it stacks up, from the top down:

• Prosciutto "chiffonade" garnish
• Crisped round bread
• Hollandaise
• Poached egg
• Prosciutto round (two thin slices deep)
• Hollandaise

Garnish all around with croutons and parsley or basil.

There might be a way of making this with fewer pans, but I doubt it. One for poaching, one for croutons, one for Hollandaise, container to separate the egg yolks. A lot of washing, but cheap + good often equals extra labor.

Sausageapalooza

Top: Toulouse style sausage. Middle (longer sausages): Azorean linguiça

Normally, the linguiça should hang long enough to dry out - but a nice long grill time at low heat on the barbecue works fine, especially since I really don't have any place other than the refrigerator for curing sausages safely.

The Azorean linguiça, once dried out on the grill, had the right flavor. It was smoky, spicy and porky, yet not greasy. In the Azores, apparently the sausages would be fried in pork fat of an unknown depth - but they would start out a lot drier, too. These sausages really don't taste like store bought linguiça - they're not as greasy, and the wine gives them a different flavor profile.

The Toulouse style sausage was from a recipe I brought back from France that omits garlic. To keep things interesting, it uses quatre épices, wine and Armagnac mixed with herbes de Provence.

So, in case you want to try these things at home, here are the notes on how to prepare them.

Azorean Linguiça
ingredients

• pork shoulder (actually, the upper part of the leg), fat trimmed off and cut into 1/4' - 1/2" cubes.
• salt, pepper to taste
• cumin to taste
• malagueta pepper to taste (you can substitute cayenne, or in my case Aleppo).
• red wine, a liberal dose. You can use cheap stuff; just taste the wine first to make sure it's drinkable.
• if it's not acidic enough, you can add vinegar or some juice from the malagueta pepper bottle.

process

1. Combine all the ingredients and let marinate three days.
2. Make a small patty with the meat and fry. Adjust seasoning for best taste. Repeat until you say, "Wow! This tastes great, but a little bit salty."
3. Stuff the mixture into pork sausage casings. The sausages should be about 30 cm (12") long for authenticity - although I prefer 6" or so links. I used a heavy pastry bag and a sausage funnel for this, although the traditional method uses some quick thumb work.
4. Smoke the sausages - preferably with hot smoke, so they dehydrate and cook during the smoking process. Cold smoke works, but you will need to cure or grill the sausages to dehydrate them. These were smoked for about three hours - that was enough to give them a nice strong smoky flavor. More smoke might have been too much, and turned them bitter. Info on the smoker here. This smoke from this device is not hot enough to cook the sausages - it's just for giving them flavor.
5. If you're being traditional, render the fat out of the trimmings and fry the sausages in it. If not, grill them over low heat so they dry out without burning. 

Toulouse Style Sausages
ingredients

1. pork shoulder, same as for the linguiça. Cut into 1" cubes and chill.
2. mix wine (white preferred, but red works) and Armagnac into the meat - about a cup of wine and a good dose of Armagnac.
3. Add a decent pinch of quatre épices
4. Add herbes de Provence - or fresh thyme
5. Salt, pepper to taste

process

1. Grind or process in small batches in a food processor with quick pulses so as not to purée the meat. 
2. Make a small patty with the meat and fry. Adjust seasoning for best taste. 
3. Stuff the filling into pork casings, hang to dry (cure) in the refrigerator for a day or two.
4. Grill the sausages.

Smoke it!

Schematic diagram of the smoker

The smoker in action

Once you've made some sausages, there comes a time when fate requires you to smoke them. This time, it was when some friends came from Brazil and shared a recipe for Azorean style linguiça. This style of linguiça seems a lot leaner than the stuff you buy in the supermarket, using pork shoulder trimmed of fat, red wine, garlic, more garlic, and while we're at it, a bit more garlic, salt, pepper and cumin. Once it's been stuffed into pork casings, it's traditionally smoked.

The Mark I smoker was to use a rectangular charcoal grill to generate the smoke, which would rise through some duct work into the smoking chamber. Unfortunately, the grill leaked smoke so badly that much of it never got to the chamber. It was hard to refill, if needed. Then, to add a last parting shot, the duct tape decided that it did not want to stick to warm metal, even though the metal never got too hot to touch in the smoker.

Luckily, the Mark II was started at about the same time as excess smoke started escaping from the Mark I. It would use an old wok to hold the wood chips, held firmly against a conical hood that would direct a maximum amount of smoke into the ducting and hence into the smoking chamber.

About the same time the last piece of duct tape popped off the metal, the Mark II was ready for action, held together with rebar wire and formed to fit snugly over the top of the wok. The plug snicked into the extension cord, the electric lighter began to sizzle on the damp wood chips, and in a short time voluminous billows of smoke emerged from the upper smoking chamber. The lighter was unplugged as smoke shrouded the back yard... maybe this new system was too efficient? Once unplugged, smoke levels returned to normal, and all it took to get things smoldering again was a quick five minutes of electric heat. Eventually, the chips lit enough to smoke on their own and the starter was removed.

Three hours later, about five pounds of linguiça emerged, giving off a nicely smoky aroma. Into the refrigerator it went, where it would hang to dry.

This smoker, while great for sausages, apparently won't work for salmon since the smoke is much too hot. The Mark III will have longer ducting so that the smoke will cool before reaching the chamber. The new chamber will probably resemble a wood wardrobe, with opening doors and a combination of racks and hanging spaces so it can be used for hams, salmon and sausages, depending on the occasion.

The sausages are still curing a bit in the refrigerator, awaiting everyone's arrival for the Big Tasting. So, I'll save the sausage report for later just to thicken the plot.

Making sausages and quenelles

Italian style sausage, linguini, dandelion greens

Quenelles de truite

French style garlic sausage

The garde-manger class might be affecting me. This is where we learn to make sausages, mousseline, patés, galantines... After only a few short weeks, I no longer see things like pieces of roast or fillets of fish the same way. I have this strange desire to grind them up and transform them into something else. The sausages started out this morning as a piece of pork shoulder. The photo of the quenelles de truite was done in class, but I redid the recipe at home yesterday just to make sure I had all the steps down. So, a trout was filleted, boned, skinned and ground up with some other stuff and piped into boiling salted water, then baked with some nice white wine sauce to make quenelles.  Very French.

One thing I discovered was that making things into sausages and quenelles stretches them out quite a bit. Two trout fillets are more than enough to feed three people, since there are other things (like butter, some more butter, and then a bit of butter, and some cream, and some butter) that stretch them out. So, one meager trout, transformed into quenelles, can easily feed four people. Especially if they consume a lot of freshly baked baguettes first.

It's not that this wasn't anticipated. I found some natural sausage casings at Claro's Market in L.A. and couldn't resist. The thing is that I don't have a meat grinder (yet) so I have to process the meat in a food processor, which tends to make it come out too fine and pasty even when it's ice cold. I don't have a sausage attachment or anything fancy like that either - I have a funnel and a spoon handle. Slow but it gets the job done, although the meat in the casing has to be peristaltically arranged so that the casing is not overstuffed. Kind of like milking a goat, actually.

Trout-Salmon quenelles
These are like skinless sausages that you pipe out into boiling water, then finish in the oven with a sauce. Don't be shocked at the amount of butter and cream you'll use. This is classic French food, so just watch some Julia Child videos if you want to be comforted about the butter.

Ingredients

Mousseline
1 lb Fresh, never frozen trout (I'm using trout instead of salmon because it's supposedly sustainably farmed). Ice crystals made during freezing rupture the cells and make the fish unsuitable for making mousseline.
3 Egg whites
1 1/2 cup Heavy cream
Salt, Pepper, Nutmeg to taste
4 Shrimp (this can be frozen, since it's just for flavor). Cook, chop into 1/4" cubes and chill.
3 oz Panade, in this case pâte à choux made with milk instead of water, then chilled.
Ice cubes, about 4-5.

Sauce (quantities are approximate)
Butter
1 Tbsp flour
2 oz Whole milk or cream
1 Shallot, finely chopped
Some fresh thyme leaves (optional)
8 oz Fish or shrimp stock
4 oz Dry white wine
Salt, Pepper to taste

Process
Mousseline

1. Trim any major bones off the fish fillets, skin them if needed, and cut into cubes. I left the pin bones in since they were going to be ground finely - and this was trout, not salmon (I'd remove them for salmon).
2. I like to grind some ice cubes in the food processor. This gets everything nice and cold. I then either use the crushed ice for cocktails or discard it.
3. Put the fish and cold panade into a food processor fitted with a metal blade.
4.  Purée the fish/panade mixture.
5. Add the egg whites and process until smooth
6. Add the salt, pepper and nutmeg. You'll need more salt than you think, but don't skimp. The salt is required to alter the protein structure of the fish. If you used enough, the fish will form itself into a ball when you process it; if not, it will remain a purée.
7. Add cream in a stream with the food processor running.
8. Mix in the shrimp cubes.
9. Taste for seasoning and adjust before you cook the quenelles - you can cook a spoonful in some boiling salted water.

Sauce

1. Sauté the shallots in some butter until they're translucent.
2. Make a roux with the flour and butter.
3. Add white wine to deglaze, then add the stock, salt and pepper.
4. Reduce down so there's not much liquid left.
5. Add the thyme leaves.
6. Reduce the heat, add the cream slowly, tasting as you go. 
7. Adjust seasoning as needed, and reserve sauce.

Assembly

1. Preheat oven to 325°F.
2. Boil water in a fairly deep pot, add salt when it boils.
3. Butter a shallow ramekin and set aside
4. Place the mousseline in a pastry bag fitted with a large, plain tip.
5. Pipe the mousseline into the boiling water, straight down. Cut off 3 to 4 inch sections (depending on the size of your ramekins) with a thin knife, skewer or anything that doesn't stick to the mousseline. If you pipe it at an angle, the quenelles will be curved instead of straight.
6. Reduce the heat so that the quenelles just simmer in the water. They're ready when they're firm.
7. Fish the quenelles out with a spider (cook-ese for a wire strainer/spoon) and place them in the ramekin.
8. Pour the sauce over the quenelles - you don't need much. It's just there to give them a nice thick coating and add flavor.
9. Bake in a bain-marie for about 15-20 minutes until the quenelles just start to show some color. A bain-marie is just a shallow pan filled with water, into which you place the ramekins. Its function is to keep the cream based sauce from getting too hot yet allow the tops of the quenelles to brown a bit.
10. Serve immediately - if you have nice small ramekins, just place them onto a serving plate with a nice garnish and voilà.