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.