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.