Marmite sausage

940g pork loin
538g pork belly
300g pork fat
25g salt
10g black pepper
54g Marmite
50ml water
Sheep casings

This is my first wholly made-up sausage recipe and it turned out a big success. I know how to make a basic sausage and I've been eating Marmite for years so I was happy mixing the two in order to see what came out.

My favourite way of eating Marmite is thickly spread on fresh bread with plenty of butter. I've tried various Marmite products and recipes before and I've never been that impressed with them. The best cooked Marmite dish I have had to date has been Eggy bread (French toast/Pan Perdu) with Marmite. Mixing Marmite with meat was going to be something new for me.

I guessed what I thought was a conservative amount of Marmite to use for the volume of meat. It's hard stuff to weigh out because of it's intense viscosity. I was pleased that I got it all out of the measuring container by warming it in a water bath and adding some boiling water. The meat acquired a lovely sticky quality once the Marmite was added and it had rested in the fridge for a few hours.

Marmite is a very salty product, about 10g salt per 100g Marmite. I reduced the amount of salt in the basic sausage recipe to account for the salt content of the Marmite so I would maintain the overall salt content of the sausages at just over 1.5%.

Marmite isn't the dominant flavour in these sausages. But the sausages have that powerful Marmite tangy/umami quality about them. And that is the reason I love Marmite. They are very more-ish. The next time I make these I would be happy to increase the amount of Marmite a little.

I used sheep casings for these sausages as I thought a thinner sausage would be better suited for such a strong flavour. It just seems better suited to smaller bites.

I over did the fat a little, which I can see now from looking at the recipe proportions. I was using up some extra fat that I had to hand and the pork loin was too lean on its own. But the extra fat comes out into the pan when the sausages are cooked, making a great Marmite sauce to pour over vegetables.

I'm very happy with these sausages. I'm already thinking ahead to making some Marmite black pudding. The colour is definitely going to suit the flavour.

Morcilla Once More

1 ltr pig blood
500g back fat
50g salt
10g black pepper
10g Pimentón
150g onion, finely chopped
8g thyme
12g garlic
300g dry Paella rice, cooked and drained
Beef runners and hog casings.

The pig blood was made up using 150g dried blood and 850ml water. The rice was cooked for 15 minutes.

It was time to make some more Morcilla after the success of the first batch. I played around with the recipe a little by using less rice this time and not cooking the rice for so long. The first time round I had been delayed with another task while the rice steamed after cooking so that it had started to loose its consistency as it sat in the pot awaiting my return. This time, I cooked the rice as though I was going to serve it. Both changes affected the texture of the finished Morcilla which was noticeably more bloody this time and the whole grains of rice were visible in the sausage. I think the previous over-cooking of the rice was a good accident and I would do this again the next time. I like the bloody nature of this Morcilla, but it does not keep its shape so well when it is peeled and put in the pan to fry. I have no idea which is the more traditional rendition of this Spanish classic, but I love the results of what I am making here.

I didn't have enough beef runners to stuff the whole lot so I had to use some smaller hog casings. I like the variety of shapes. This time I remembered to tie the sausages into rings so that I didn't loose any during poaching. Like fresh sausages, the Morcilla changed in the first 12 hours. When they first came out of the poach there was a great variety in the colours and apparent textures but by the next day they had become quite uniform.

The next time I make this, I think I will not bother with the thyme. It doesn't really seem to add anything noticeable to the sausage. I'd also cut fat into larger chunks.

I'm planning to make Marmite sausages soon. Obviously I am a big Marmite fan and I have heard good reports from people who have tried Marmite sausages. Now I'm starting to think that a Marmite black pudding would be a good idea as the colour and texture should be a natural fit.

Makin' Bacon

I am starting to broaden my interests from just sausage-making to meat preservation techniques in general and all things charcuterie. So I have bought the popular reference, Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing and my first project has been to make some bacon. It's quick, easy and very satisfying.

The process is simple. Get some pork belly, cover it with sufficient curing salt mixture, let it cure for a week and then smoke or slow cook it. Remove the rind, and slice. Done.

Pork belly trimmed and ready for curing.

It took me a while to figure out the type of curing salt that I needed. In general, there are two types of curing salt, and various names to describe them. Curing salt is toxic if you use too much. And if you use to little the meat will not cure properly and could be toxic. We want the sweet spot in the middle. So it's important to use the right stuff and to use the right amount. To make bacon, I needed to use 'cure #1'. In the States this is called 'pink salt' as it is dyed to indicate what's in it and to give a pink colour to the meat. Cure #1 is used for meat that is cured and then cooked. If I were making a meat to be eaten without cooking, like salami, I would be using 'cure #2'

Cured bacon and slow-cooked for two hours.

My girlfriend is not keen on smoked bacon so I opted for the slow cook (un-smoked) method which is to roast the cured pork belly two hours at 80 deg C. That is a very low temperature. I will make smoked bacon some other time. I now have plenty of cure and it doesn't go off.

So making the bacon was a no-brainer and the hardest part was slicing the strips of bacon. Of course I enjoy wielding my lovely sharp cooks knives so this was a labour of love. I was very happy with the finished result. Everyone else was happy too. My girlfriend seemed quite sceptical at first when I said that I would be making our usual Sunday morning bacon butties with meat that I had cured myself. But I think she changed her mind after the first bite. And when my sister and family came to stay we finished the remainder, with my sister declaring that it was the best bacon she had ever tasted. Well, she was a vegetarian for over 20 years. At the end of their stay I sent them off with a jar of cure and some instructions.

So it's time to get some more bacon on the go. I'm missing it already.

Cotechino

1.5kg Pork shoulder
1.6kg Pork belly
1.2kg Pork rind (skin)
65g salt (1.5%)
6.0g black pepper
6.0g white pepper
2.0g ground coriander
0.6g ground nutmeg
1.0g ground clove (13 cloves)
1.0g ground mace
1.0g ground cinnamon
1.5g ground chilli
20g sugar
Beef runners

I love it when things comes together. A friend has come to stay, visiting from Cleethorpes. We love Italian food and he has been to quite a few of Jamie Oliver's restaurants but never, it turns out, to one of Antonio Carluccio's. So we went out to eat a starter and cocktail at Jamie's then on to Carluccio's for the main. My girlfriend had first brought me to Carluccio's and we have been back a few times since. It's great. And the last time I went I had an amazing sausage and lentil dish. That meal was so satisfying that I had thought back to it fondly many times since and hoped I would be able to try it again some time. But now that I was going out for my next meal there, it became a typical restaurant dilemma. If the same dish was again on the menu, should I stick with what I enjoyed the last time or try something new? I would normally try something new, but the good memories of this sausage were so strong that I wanted to have it again.

Sure the sausage and lentil stew was still available and so I put the same order in as on my previous visit. I was a little disappointed that the dish was served luke warm. But the sausage delivered that something special again and this time I found out that it is called Cotechino.

Now here is where everything comes together. I have been making sausages for a while and I have been storing up plenty of pig skin in the freezer. The skin comes off and gets stored when ever I buy some pork belly. I love making crackling but I can't keep up with the amount of skin that I have been storing. Crackling is an occasional treat, not a staple.

But it turns out that what gives Cotechino that lovely texture is that it is made with pig skin that is then poached to a kind of jelly. Yum. A quick hunt around on the net and I found not only some lovely instructions on how to make Cotechino, but a great blog to read too.

The skin is boiled to soften it then put through the fine mincer to turn it into small beads of skin-fat. This is very different from the hard pork fat I am used to making sausages with and it has a lovely flowing texture when warm. When cold, it turns back into a hard lump which took a bit of work to prize apart again. It would have been much better to mix it in with the rest of the ground meat while it was still warm.

From here it is pretty much sausage-business as usual. Put everything together and stuff it into a casing. The cotechino I had at Carluccio's was quite large and so I used beef runners as the casing, just as I had used to make Morcilla.

To cook the Cotechino, they are poached (simmered) for 2.5 hours. This renders down the pork rind to give the sausage it's unique texture. Mine weren't as good as those I had at the restaurant, but I am greatly impressed with them. I think they have a quality that is reminiscent of Haggis, another favourite of mine.

What I didn't do, and this was the same mistake I made when I made Morcilla, was to tie the ends off well enough so I again had to cope with a loosing a few when poaching. The best way to tie these types of sausages is into a complete ring, so the two ends are tied off against each other. Something to remember for next time.

Toulouse encore

2kg pork belly
30g salt
8g black pepper
15g garlic
11g parsley
6g sage
5g thyme
2.5 g nutmeg
100ml red wine
sheep casings
I made another batch of Toulouse sausages to take to a friend's bbq. I played about with the spices and reduced the amount of garlic in the recipe. I love garlic, I really do, but I have noticed that the recipes in The Sausage Book are garlic overkill to the point of obliterating rather than enhancing the taste of the meat.
I made this batch using sheep casings because I have run out of the larger hog casings. I used to think that I preferred the larger casings as they seem more 'meaty'. This aligns with my preference for a rough rather than a finely minced filler. But it just depends what mood I am in and these thin Toulouse sausages turned out lovely and I was very happy to nibble them rather than feel they needed to be carved.
A new pack of hog casings are now on order, along with some curing spice #1 to make some bacon. Making bacon will be my next project and it is an easy start into the world of curing and charcuterie. I have just bought Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing and I'm eager to see what use I can make of it.

Thai

2kg pork belly
25g salt
20g crushed garlic
30g chopped fresh coriander
7g white pepper
130ml lime juice
15g lemon grass
20g fresh ginger
100g finely chopped shallot
20g shrimp paste
7g crushed or ground chilli
Hog casings
All flavourings except the coriander are ground in a mortar and pestle then all are mixed into the meat before stuffing.
I'm just back from a trip to Turkey and so I have a taste for spiced meat. Being a predominantly Islamic country, there's no pork sausge to be found in Turkey, just delicious spiced beef and lamb. I shall be making Adana kebabs soon. But for now, as a way to satisfy my desire for spicy meat, I decided to make some Thai sausages.
I found a Thai sausage recipe here that seemed interesting but I lost my nerve a bit when I increased the quantities up for 2kg of meat. I wondered if some of the tablespoons and teaspoon quantities had been mixed up. 4 tablespoons of shrimp paste seems an awful lot of this really strong ingredient. I'm no kind of expert when it comes to Thai cooking, with Tom Yum soup the only dish I have ever made from fresh ingredients. But I am used to seeing recipes printed with typos so I thought I would be safe to adjust some of the quantities down.

The finished sausages are great, and I think I did well to reduce the amount of lime juice. This could have come down even more as the result was still a little wet. But the shrimp paste, lemon grass, ginger and chilli could all be ramped up to give even more zing.
I used hog casings for this as I have run out of sheep, but I think these would suit a thinner sausage.

Bratwurst Bramberger Art

1.4kg pork belly
750g smoked streaky bacon
28g salt
4.0g white pepper
2.9g mace
3g cardamom
2.0g Marjoram
20ml white wine
175ml milk
2 large eggs
This recipe asked for the meat to be coarse ground, spices added and then the whole lot to be fine ground. I didn't like the texture of the finished sausage. I was too fine and bitty. I definitely prefer my sausages to be either coarse ground and meaty or fully emulsified in a blender.
The spice mixture of this sausage is wonderful, though I wasn't sure what happened to the Marjoram. Definitely one to do again.

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

Italian Sausage with Fennel 2

1.6kg pork shoulder
0.5kg hard pork fat
30g salt
15g ground black pepper
15g crushed garlic
7g whole fennel seed
3g ground fennel seed
125ml iced water

This is a slightly simplified version of the recipe I used last time.

I was more delicate with the pork fat this time and spent some time chilling it in the freezer to make it easier to handle and with less chance of smearing. This made a big improvement in the way the fat handled. I think it would work straight from frozen too, which is something I should try the next time I use a recipe that calls for pork fat.

I also cubed the fat with a knife rather than putting it though the mincer. I don't know it this was strictly necessary, but I was pleased with the result. However, it did take an age, so next time the fat will be minced in the machine from frozen.

These sausages were taken to a friend's bbq and went down very well. I love 'em.

Italian Sausage with Fennel

1.3 Kg pork shoulder
0.5 Kg hard pork fat
20g salt
7.0g ground black pepper
4.0g white pepper
15g crushed garlic
5.0g whole fennel seed
2.0g ground fennel seed
1.0g ground Coriander seed
125.0 mm iced water

I'd really enjoyed the fennel sausages that my Sicilian neighbour had brought round and so I decided to make my own batch. And the finished product tastes great.

I was a little disappointed with the quality of the pork fat that I got in. This batch wasn't as good as the previous that I had from my usual butcher. It came in smaller strips rather than a single hard lump, suggesting that the fat had come from a different part of the animal. Getting hard pork fat for making sausages is not so easy, and it seems to be a recurring theme on the sausage-making forums. Part of the problem is that modern pigs are bred with much less fat than yesteryear, meaning that there is much less to go round. I guess that it is natural that a butcher would want to keep the best fat for making their own sausages. There is another good butcher just outside my girlfriend's village and so next time I will try ordering fat from him. When I spoke to him a couple of weeks ago he seemed quite enthusiastic about me ordering from him, which has not been my general experience with the butchers I've spoken to.

I think that the overall fat proportion should come down the next time I make these sausages. I will make them again because they taste so damn good. I am quite a fan of fennel and the delicate sweetness that it gives to the meat in this recipe works really well.

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.

Venison and Port 2

2.2 kg venison
750g hard pork fat
45g salt
8g black pepper
5g rosemary
3g juniper
15g garlic
225ml port wine
hog and sheep casings

For this second batch of venison and port sausages I used hard pork fat rather than pork belly. Visually the finished sausages have a better mottled effect as they have a greater colour contrast between the venison and the fat.

I also used less juniper in this batch as I had worried that I had over spiced the first lot. However, the juniper in the first batch turned out fine after a day or two when the flavours had balanced. I don't think this batch was any the worse for cutting it back a little. So I am pleased with both batches. I'm not sure that the port adds that much to the taste. Maybe a bit of sweetness. Next time I will try something else like a red wine.

I ran out of hog casings while stuffing and had finish them off in sheep casings. The thinner skins of the sheep casings show much more of the deep colour of the venison and port.

Having tasted both batches side by side, I am very happy with both of them. When I make venison sausages again, I will consider increase the fat content to make them a bit more succulent. While the flavourings are great, maybe reducing the quantity a little will let the taste of the venison shine more.

Venison and Port 1

1.3 kg venison
1.0 kg pork belly
35g salt
6g black pepper
4g juniper berries
6g rosemary
125cl Port
hog casings

The meat man came round and dropped off a  haunch of venison. My Lycra-clad cycle-courier left me with a lovely piece of 21 day-old meat to process into sausages. He knows someone that shoots and I had suggested that we try making some venison sausages.

It was a synch to get the meat off the bone. All the meat came away very cleanly and easily. I was left with 2.5kg of venison, a small thigh bone and a table spoon of fat. I processed this into sausages in two batches on different nights.

Because there is no fat on the haunch, the recipe requires some to be added. For this first batch I used pork belly at about 50/50 pork to venison. I minced the venison by hand using my baby little mincer. It flowed through the machine with ease, like mincing liver.

I've never cooked with juniper berries before. When I tasted the freshly made sausage, my initial reaction was that I had used too many. The next day when I tried it again, the balance was just right. This dramatic taste change over time is something I have noticed since I began making sausages. It can be quite a radical transformation and it's not limited to the first 24 hours as some articles suggest. I have read advice to cook and eat some sausage pate before stuffing to check the seasoning. While this sounds like a good idea, the balance of everything changes so much as the sausage matures that it could pick up only extreme cases like forgetting to add the salt.

There is also a similar change in texture as the sausage dries, The freshly made texture of these venison sausages seemed quite burger-like, possibly because it was so moist from the port. But two days later and the sausage is quite firm and dark. I think I would add a greater fat content the next time to make them a bit juicier. I would also reduce the salt content a little.

Alsation Christmas Sausage

2.0kg pork belly
30g salt
5g ground black pepper
5g sugar
12 cloves
1g (1/4 teaspoon) ground ginger
1g (1/4 teaspoon) ground cinnamon
0.5g (3/8 teaspoon) ground nutmeg:
sheep casings

Because I am just starting out making sausages, I'm still very keen to try new techniques and new recipes. The possibilities seem endless. The chance to explore and experiment is an exciting aspect of food and cooking that I enjoy. I saw this Christmas sausage recipe at Sausage Mania and it caught my imagination. I like the notion of a Christmas sausage, especially as it is only the end of April. When winter comes, I love to drink mulled wine and this recipe uses much the same spices.

I fine minced the pork belly for this sausage. This is the first time I have used the fine mesh on my mincer. I figure it is in keeping with the smaller diameter of the sheep casing.

I got some more lovely pork belly from Gog Magog Hills butchers and this time I asked them not to score the skin. It makes taking it off the belly much easier. One sausage-making friend made his first batch of sausages without first removing the skin from the pork belly. He wasn't impressed with the result.

Once the skin is off, it's ready for scoring and making into some bonus crackling. I prepared this piece and put it in the freezer for another day when I will take it to share with my girlfriend. It has been noted that I had selfishly eaten the previous one all by myself.

There's no garlic in this sausage and, along with the Christmas spices, the result is a very un-meaty sausage. The spice and fine mincing gives this sausage a light taste and texture. It's quite un-sausage-like, which is a bit weird but very good. I imagine that children or recovering vegetarians would like this sausage. I'd like to do something like this again, but with fewer and heavier spices. Maybe full-on fresh ginger and clove? 12 cloves for this amount of meat is about right, though maybe it could be taken back a little. I think I will soon be experimenting with chilli as a sausage spice. And why no go the whole hog and make a Vindaloo sausage? It's easy to get carried away dreaming up exotic spices, but I think I need to remember that the primary intention should be to enhance the meat rather than distract from it.

Return to Cumberland

I wouldn't be making sausages if I didn't love eating them. And long before I started making them I had discovered Cranston's Cumberland sausages. I first tasted this wonderful sausage on a New Year holiday in the Lake District while staying in the home of a friend and taking their advice on which local produce to try. The sausage was a revelation to eat - thick, meaty and spicy. This was the best British sausage I could remember eating. A sausage epiphany! I realised that the Cumberland sausage sold in supermarkets is a poor imitation of the original. It's a joke that national retailers twist a boring sausage into a spiral and call it a Cumberland sausage; they are just trading on the good name of the real thing. Unfortunately, this is fairly typical of national retailing attitudes to food in this country.

A few years later, I was delighted when I saw that the Cumberland Sausage had won Protected Geographical Status (PGS). But I was less delighted to find out that the details of the PGS registration are only for the name 'Traditional Cumberland Sausage'. The supermarkets can still sell their boring twirls as Cumberland Sausage without declaring them Traditional. I guess that the case for the PGS wasn't helped by the extinction of the Cumberland pig in the 1960's or that the local butchers couldn't agree on how the sausage should be spiced. I've now tried a few Cumberland varieties and they can be very different.

Via the internet I found that I could order Cumberland sausages on-line. A few years  later I found another Cranston's shop in Carlisle, while visiting my girlfriend's parents. It was rare that my freezer didn't have a good stock of my favourite sausages - buying these large coils of meat and chopping them into individual portions.

Now that I make my own sausages, freezer space is at a premium. Yesterday I found my last portion of Cumberland sausage, buried under a stack of home-made Paysanne and Chorizo. I decided to finish them off and it wasn't long before I had that wonderful smell filling the kitchen. Of course they were delicious, but my perception has changed since I have been eating my own-made sausages. What once tasted so delectably meaty now seemed somewhat spongy. Yes, they use coarser ground meat than the regular sausages on sale in the supermarket. Yes they have a higher meat content than the average British banger. But still, I think it is the addition of rusk makes it now seem bready and slightly spongy.

I read recently of another respected sausage producer in the UK making Toulouse sausages and adding breadcrumbs to give it 'the texture that the British public expects'. Until recently, that was the texture that I expected and I can't help thinking that these meat-only sausages, while utterly delicious, have turned me into a whinger about my nation's home-grown products. So three cheers for the Continentalisation of the British palate. Some day all sausages will be made with nothing but meat and spice. Anything else is just stuffing.

Morcilla

150g dried pig blood
900 ml water
500g hard pork back fat
400g dry Arborio rice, cooked
100g onion, fine chopped
10g garlic, crushed
5g thyme
10g Pimentón (sweet smoked paprika)
50g salt
5g black pepper
beef runners

Making Morcilla (Spanish black pudding) is a big deal for me. I have been a fan of blood sausage for a long time now and it's the texture I love as much as the taste. I also warm to the 'waste no part of the animal' attitude of its origins. It's an odd journey for someone like me, raised to eat neither pork nor blood products. I wonder if there are other Jewish black-pudding fans out there? Maybe we should start a club. Or a support group?

This is a different type of product to a fresh meat sausage so for me it represents yet another new branch of my sausage-making experiences. Like Boudin Blanc, Morcilla is a pre-cooked sausage. These spent an hour and 20 minutes poaching in water at 80 degrees C. I am going to have to get a bigger pot for this kind of thing, as my largest pot is a domestic pressure-cooker base and it could barely cope with the load.

Again, I chose to use a recipe from The Sausage Book. I have seen other recipes for making blood sausage that use just a funnel, nozzle and ladle to get the blood mixture into the casings. No stuffer required. But with this recipe, the rice gives the pre-cooked sausage a firm rather than a runny texture such that a sausage stuffer is needed to get the mixture into the casings. The rice is not noticeable in the finished sausage which has a light and fluffy-yet-sticky texture; something that I enjoy about black pudding.

My biggest problem came with tying off the links. These need to be tied off with string rather than just twisting the casing like a regular sausage. This is partly because the mixture is more runny than sausage meat and also the beef runners are thicker walled than hog casings and more likely to open. I tried to use lightweight cooking twine but it was not up to the job and kept breaking. The result was that one of my puddings spilled its contents into the poaching pan. A terrible loss. Next time I will invest in some butchers' string and tie them off properly.

I don't know if the thyme is right in this recipe. There is not enough to make a difference to taste, so next time I will either leave it out or increase the quantity. Maybe some rosemary would work well along side it.

This is the first time that I got to use beef runners to make sausage. I have enough left for another batch and then I will try using beef middles to see the difference in size and shape it produces.

Fresh Chorizo

2.2kg pork belly
40g salt
20g garlic
50g paprika
hog casings

This is fresh chorizo, not the cured stuff. So it's just paprika and garlic flavoured sausage, but it's also the best sausage that I have made to date. For the meat, I bought a 'hand of pork' from my local butcher, Gog Magog Hills, and the meat is fantastic.

The new sausage stuffer performed incredibly well. It produced a beautifully even sausage that was easy to fill and without any wasted mixture. The meat is a little on the lean side so the sausage has quite a firm texture. I like this. I suspect that the large amount of paprika used in this recipe also contributes to the sausages' solidity.

Stuffer Upgrade

When I started making sausages I bought myself the cheapest mincer/stuffer I could find, just in case I only wanted to use it a few times and call it a day. I chose a KitchenKraft model and it worked just fine, once I learned it's little quirks.

The suction base comes loose quite easily, so I have to regularly reseat it on the worktop. It's easier to do this before it comes free, just as it starts to loose its grip. When stuffing the sausage, you need three hands - one to turn the handle, one to press the meat into the stuffer, and one to regulate the rate of mixture filling the casing.

So for a better sausage-stuffing experience, and hopefully a better sausage, I have now bought a Pro-V 3L Stainless Steel Stuffer from Franco's Famous SausageMaking.org.

When my new stuffer arrived I was taken aback by how big this was. 3 litres is a large capacity. I was worried that in my haste to upgrade I had bought something too big for domestic use. But my doubts vanished once I put the new stuffer to use.

The stuffer is made from heavy stainless steel so it doesn't budge when I turn the handle and I don't need that extra hand to push down on the sausage mixture. I have used it only once so far, but the results were great. The stuffer delivers very quickly and smoothly. I still need my little KitchenKraft mincer to grind the meat, but I shall be seeing my sister soon who has promised to return my electric mincer.

Merguez

2kg fatty lamb chops
30g salt
6g black pepper
3g ground fennel
20g crushed garlic
24g harissa paste
sheep casings

Merguez is a North African sausage that I enjoy at our local Algerian restaurant, Al Casbah. Merguez are very popular in France and my mother tells me that when travelling there with my father, he would eat them wherever he found they were being served.

The recipes for Merguez that I have found on the net are split between the simple North African version and the more complex French chef's version. I stuck with a simple recipe that uses harissa to give colour and most of the spice.

As usual for fresh sausage, the ingredients are simply mixed together and stuffed into sheep casings. This is my first sausage that uses sheep casings rather than hog casings. This caused no problems and gives a lovely long, thin sausage shape. The recipe uses just lamb for the meat and I chose to use chops as the fat content seem about right. And I love lamb chops. There are many cheaper cuts of lamb to use than lamb chops that would work as well if not better.

Normally, I cook my sausages in the oven, but I prefer to grill Merguez. The sausages came out well, and I hope to go back to Al Casbah soon to see how they compare.

A Sicilian's sausage

Frank is my next door neighbour, an 83 year old Sicilian. He is amazingly fit for his age. Last summer I was surprised at how easily he took to climbing one of his large fig trees to pick me some fruit. He is always keeping busy growing vegetables in the garden or preserving them in his shed.

We got chatting about mincers, grinders and sausage making. He said that he used to make sausage and that the only thing holding him back now was not having a source of casings. I went back to Tong Master on-line and ordered some casings for him. The following week his grandson turned up on my door step with an offering of Sicilian fennel sausage, made with roughly chopped fennel seed. Of course, it was very good. I am planning to grow fennel this year and I will have a go at making a fresh fennel version.

Toulouse Sausages

2kg pork belly
30g salt
5g black pepper
100ml red wine
20g garlic
20g parsley
4g sage
4g thyme
2g nutmeg
hog casings

I first tasted Toulouse sausage when a good friend brought some for me from his local market in Lyon. This was to make a Cassoulet while on our ski trip. They were amazing. So I was looking forward to having a go at my own version of this sausage.

Toulouse sausages are as easy to make as the Paysanne. The ingredients are roughly the same. The difference is that they have the addition of red wine and a minor adjustment of the fresh herbs and spice.

The finished sausage is very different from the Paysanne. The wine adds a deeper colour and the cooked sausage has a deeper, richer taste.

I have now started to compare recipes I find on the the net and in books and I see that there is no definitive recipe for Toulouse, or indeed any type of sausage. Every sausage recipe is a variation on a theme and after considering many for the Toulouse sausage recipes, I thought that the one in The Sausage Book is as good as any other. I notice that recipes are either simple or complex. The simple recipes, like this one, have few ingredients and provide a bold flavour. The complex versions are apparently fine-tuned versions. They are the type of recipe that calls for both black and white pepper, or three different types of paprika. I guess that I will stick with the simple recipes for now.

Boudin Blanc

500g chicken breast
500g lean pork shoulder
20g salt
3g white pepper
15g cloves
3g porcini powder
250g creme fraiche
3-4 eggs
30g parsley
hog casings

Buoyed up by the success of my Paysanne sausages, I decided to try my hand at making pre-cooked sausages. This complicates the process only slightly in that the ingredients are both minced and then blended in a food processor and that after stuffing, the sausages are simmered in water to pre-cook them before storage and re-heating to eat.

Cloves: The original recipe called for 1g cloves. The kitchen scale I used was not fine enough to cleanly differentiate between 1 and 2 grams so my sausages turned out a bit over-cloved - just right for Christmas. I think using 15 cloves next time will be better rather than the 20 I used here. Also, I didn't grind the cloves enough before adding them and I think it would be improved with a finer ground spice mixture.

Eggs: I used 4 large eggs and I thought that the sausages were slightly eggy. So next time I would use 3 large eggs or 4 medium eggs.

After blending in the food processor, the mixture becomes quite sticky, like gum. This makes stuffing into the casings harder work and another pair of hands would have helped. The result this time was that the casings became over-stuffed as I didn't have a hand free to correct the flow of meat into the casing. Many of the sausage casings split while simmering.

Overall a great success, though. These sausages have the slightly rubbery texture of frankfurters that I loved as a child. I couldn't decide if I preferred eating them fried or boiled. So I will have to make some more to settle that point

Paysanne Sausages

2kg pork belly
30g salt
10g black pepper
20g garlic
15g thyme
30g parsley
hog casings

This is a French farmers sausage recipe. It is used to illustrate all the fresh sausage recipes in The Sausage Book, the instruction manual for my sausage experiments.

It turns out that all fresh sausages are very easy to make - mince the meat, mix in the flavouring, stuff into casings.

It took me a while to mince the pork bellies as I started off forcing the meat into the mincer and it jammed. Once I realised that it needs to be done in small pieces without force, it flowed quite smoothly. Filling the casings went well with only one small split.

These were delicious sausages. The garlic packs a savoury punch and the fresh thyme is gorgeous. At some point I would like to compare using fresh or dried herbs to see the differences.

One of the best things about the recipes in The Sausage Book is that there is no mention of rusk (breadcrumb). Apparently, rusk is a 'stabiliser' that no British banger can do without. I am happy making these foreign nonsense sausages made out of meat.

Getting Going

I have wanted to make sausages on and off for over twenty years, but somehow I never got around to it. About ten years ago I bought an electric mincer and stuffer but I have never used it. It stayed in it's box until I passed it on brand new to my sister. Then a couple of weeks ago my girlfriend and I got our first bit of real sun for the year and we went out for a relaxing day in Ely, including a trip to Topping & Company bookshop. I had no idea what book I wanted to buy, but it wouldn't seem right going in to that lovely bookshop and not coming out with something. I left with a copy of The Sausage Book, by Nick Sandler & Johny Acton, and a surprising urge to make some quality sausage.

A week later and I had read the book and ordered a basic mincer and stuffer along with a pack of hog casings. When they arrived, it was just a quick trip to the supermarket to get pork bellies and herbs. I was ready to make my first sausage.

A Title to Start

While I was setting up this sausage-making blog, I found a link to this 1907 film, Course à la Saucisse. I see where Benny Hill found his inspiration for the chase sequences I would watch on the TV as a child. It seems a suitable title to borrow for my blog.