Garlic & Brandy Sausages

 

The best thing about making your own sausages is that you can do what you want, add what you want and create something that you either couldn't find or would cost you five times more than the ingredients.

These were the result of looking at pre-made sausages, checking the price and saying "wait!". About $4.00 worth of pork shoulder, some spices, some herbs (mostly from the garden) and a generous dash of brandy: something good, cheap and unique.

This is what went into them:

• Pork shoulder
• Salt
• Fresh ground black pepper
• Fresh garlic, fine mince. Be generous.
• Fresh thyme, from the garden
• Fresh sage, also from the garden
• Dried oregano, harvested in the garden last summer and left to dry in the garage
• Pâté spices, also known as four spice: cinnamon, powdered ginger, nutmeg and cloves. Mixed at home because I don't like buying blends - buying individual spices lets you create your own blends as needed for greater flexiblity
• Urfa chili- a dark, almost coffee-like dried chili.
• Roasted cumin seeds, whole. Just a few, so every so often the flavor profile will change.
• Brandy (Cognac or Armagnac would work, too). This was cheaper.
• Dried milk powder - this is a kind of protein binder.
• Pork sausage casings, soaked and rinsed. Don't get the foolish type with plastic thingies inside the casings. Just simple casings packed in salt will do fine.

These could have had more pork fat added, but I decided to keep them lean.

Just grind everything up, fry a patty to taste, adjust the seasonings and stuff some hog casings with the forcemeat. 

Let them dry in the fridge for a day or so, then grill. Don't overcook or they'll be dry, since the extra fat was omitted.

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.

Corn dogs!

You're at the fair. It's summer. This is what you want. Corn dogs. Better yet, Jumbo Corn dogs. One of America's most beloved additions to the world's culinary culture. Served with ketchup, mustard, hot sauce, BBQ sauce...

So, with all the supposed American creativity going on here in the birthplace of corn dogs, why are they all pretty much the same thing? A large hot dog or Polish sausage with a stick up its nether end, battered and fried. Ok, they're tasty, but what if you were at the fair every day? Would you perhaps yearn for a flight of corn dogs, each one different? So different that you could eat them for at least a week and never repeat the experience? No, we're not talking calories or belly diameter here. Just flavor.

The basic corn dog has a flour/corn meal batter, baking powder/baking soda, salt, pepper, milk (or buttermilk) and oil (from frying). They can have egg, bacon drippings, sugar... Plus sauce.

Chef Ray at ARC once made corn dogs using Toulouse style French garlic sausages. I ate too many, and I wasn't the only one. Proof that there's room for creativity in the dog-on-stick realm.

So, after my three days at the fair, where I diligently inspected more booths than you could shake a (corn dog) stick at, I started thinking... corn dogs for a week... two weeks...

Day 1:
Basic corn dog: standard batter, beef hot dog. Get this part done and end your jonesing for the traditional.

Day 2:
Green chili corn dog: Green chili/pork/tomatillo sausage in Chili/fresh corn batter. Cilantro mayonnaise.

Day 3:
North African dog: Spicy lamb merguez sausage in Corn/cilantro batter. Harissa sauce (red peppers, chilis, garlic, olive oil...)

Day 4:
Clucking Corn Dog: Chicken mousseline in garlic/parsley corn batter, dipped in beer batter and fried again for crunch. Served with aioli.

Day 5:
Salmon dog: Thin-sliced salmon fillet, doused with lemon-dill sauce, rolled, wrapped in nori (seaweed), rolled in rice, dipped in wasabi tempura batter. Served with tempura dipping sauce.

Day 6:
HogDog: Italian pork sausage with fennel, wrapped in bacon, lard batter. Served with bacon dripping - basil mayo.

Day 7:
Squash Dog: zucchini with burdock (gobo) root inside, rosemary/garlic/sage paste, blue corn/quinoa batter, garlic aioli. All organic, of course.

Day 8: 
SheepDog: ground lamb, bulgur wheat, pine nuts, cinnamon, sesame seed batter, tahini sauce.

Day 9: 
DimSumDog: ground chicken, garlic, chives, five spice powder. Rolled in dim sum dough (like for char siu bao) and steamed. Black bean/chili sauce for dipping.

Day 10:
Melanzana: Grilled eggplant round, Parmesan cheese, Pecorino romano cheese, Garlic paste. Onion-Parmesan batter. Marinara sauce for dip. Alternate: use polenta instead of corn dog batter.

Day 11:
Molé Dog: sage/turkey/garlic/chili sausage, chocolate/chili batter, five chili sauce for dipping.

Day 12:
Fire Dog: Habanero/onion/pork sausage, bhut jolokia pepper batter, habañero chili relish.

Day 13:
Wimp Dog: Potato/turkey/chive sausage, parsley/chive batter, lemon thyme sauce. This is sort of medicinal, to help people get over the fire dog.

Day 14:
Mastiff: One pound ground beef/pork bacon sausage, horseradish batter, beef jus for dipping. This is so they don't leave hungry.

There are still a few more options, but two weeks of corn dogs should keep anyone happy. If you make any of these, please let me know how they came out.

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.