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.