two. ate.

I love charcuterie-based food. Even more, I love making charcuterie-based foods--there's something about working with meat in such a way as to transform it into mixed and/or preserved forms. It's very challanging and rewarding.

This weekend is a sausage-making weekend. This afternoon, we made the start of five kinds of sausage:

  - a French "cervalas aux pistaches" (pork boudin-style with brandy and pistachios)
  - Bratwurst (pork, veal, mace, majoram and milk)
  - Spanish chorizo (smoked pork with lots of spices and red wine)
  - an Italian with bulk spices
  - a Polish with bulk spices

We did roughly two pounds of each. The pork was from both pork butt and pork belly (for fat content). The veal was a bit of veal stew meat. All spices were dried. The "bulk" spices were ones that came in a sausage making kit I ordered online. The kit had a variety of casings plus two plastic containers of pre-made "styled" flavors. The casings were pure pork preserved in salt.

The first time we made sausage, we made 15 bloody (literally) pounds of it. Believe me, that was a PITA. Doing two pounds of each was much more, well...manageable.

The Kitchen Aid mixer got a full workout with grinding being its primary task. I drove to Tom's house to pick up my American Charcuterie book and he asked me to test his newest kitchen toy: a hand-press sausage stuffer. The genesis of this was one particularly grueling day that Tom spent putting finely ground sausage meat back into his Kitchen Aid mixer (w/sausage attachment). Finely ground sausage sticks to everything that it touches and jamming that back into the mixer was too much. Time for some old fashioned technology.

The stuffer looks like cross between a medieval torture device and a Viking horn. You can quickly see its one and only use...getting meat into the big hole and forcing it through the small hole. Elegant.

We just worked through the batches of meat and spices doing these grinds:

  - French cervelas: small plate grind, mix
  - Bratwurst: medium plate grind, mix, small plate grind
  - Chorizo: small plate grind, mix, small plate grind
  - Italian: medium plate grind, mix
  - Polish: medium plate grind, mix, small plate grind

Most of the base recipies were from The Savory Sausage by Linda Merinoff. Additions to (or subtractions from) were all done by cooking and tasting the mixed sausage. All sausage meat was put into the fridge to sit overnight for development and distribution of flavors.

More tomorrow...