This is not a Saveloy

1.5 Kg twice fine minced pork shoulder
25g salt
5g white pepper
2g ground cardamom
1g ground mace
10g ground paprika
10g beetroot powder
Hog casings

This turned out to be my first sausage-making failure. Although the end product was both edible and wonderfully spiced, these sausages had a dry texture and were nothing like Saveloys. It was my fault for not following the recipe properly.

My sister came to stay and brought my electric mincer back. I have never used it since I bought it, about 8 years ago, and then lent it to her. I got distracted by the novelty of using it and forgot that the recipe instructed the meat be twice fine-minced. For some reason, I chose to coarse mince the meat just once. It's weird that I should have made this mistake as I had already noted that a Saveloy is an emulsified-type sausage and would need a fine texture. A Saveloy is essentially an English version of the Frankfurter.

Still, I was very pleased with the way the electric mincer performed. Much better than tiring my shoulder with the manual mincer. And the mincing done in a quarter of the time.

So I ended up with some weird looking, lumpy-bumpy and quite dry sausages. The poaching shrunk the skin tight to the coarse meat and emphasised the rugged texture. No 'Sav' should look like this!

The beetroot powder hardly gave the promised colour to the sausage. Next time I will double the quantity.

I had another taste-changing experience using the spices. When I first made these sausages I cooked and ate one. Although I was dismayed with the texture, shape and colour, I was delighted with the taste. The spices were very vibrant and exciting. A few days later, when I tried them again, the spices were much more subtle and the flavour of the pork dominated. It's interesting to track the change of the taste of sausages by eating them over the coarse of a week. It takes a while for the flavours to balance which can mean they become stronger or, as in this case, dilute. Another thing I notice is that freezing dulls the taste a little. The defrosted sausages still taste great, but they lack the vibrancy of the pre-frozen part of the batch.