Boerewors

1.9 Kg beef
1.0Kg pork belly
40.0g salt
10g ground black pepper
16.5g ground coriander seeds
2.1g (25) ground cloves
0.8 (1/2 nut) ground nutmeg
7g ground allspice
15g brown sugar
125ml red-wine vinegar (or wine)
hog casings

This is a South African sausage recipe and one I had been intrigued by for quite a while. There are many different recipes to choose from on the net and I settled on this one, measuring out the ingredients by volume and recording the gram weights. I prefer to work in gram weights. My fine scales are accurate to 0.1g which is good even for accurate weighing of things like ground nutmeg.

I course-minced the meat twice before stuffing, mixing the meat, spices and vinegar after the first time through mincer.

Again this was a sausage that I was taking to a friend's bbq. I don't mind taking a punt on a new recipe and seeing how it turns out. It's good to have a large group of beta testers.

There were two problems with this recipe.

Firstly, the clove was overpowering - too much clove and not ground fine enough. I had the same issue when I made the Boudin Blanc so it is slowly dawning on me that this is a spice to watch. Next time I will halve the quantity of cloves to allow the other spices to come through.

But the biggest problem was the the meat was too dry. I bought great quality beef skirt from my favourite butcher. There was not a drop of fat on it, much like the venison that I used recently. I didn't add any pork fat and while the pork belly I used was beautifully fatty, there just wasn't enough to add the required juiciness to the finished article. So some pork fat or a higher proportion of pork belly would be needed next time around