Sage Sausage

Ingredient	Grams	Percentage
pork belly	2580	95.66
salt	41	1.52
black pepper	20	0.74
Sage, rough cut	56	2.08

Casing: beef runners, sheep casings

Sage goes fantastically well with pork as the good folks in Lincolnshire know and so I thought I would have a go at making my own Lincolnshire-style sausages using the purple sage that grows in my garden. I had no recipe to follow so I guessed at the quantities of sage and black pepper to use. The salt, as usual, I kept to 1.5%.

I diverged form a Lincolnshire sausage recipe in that I don't use binder (rusk) so the sausage doesn't have the 'traditional' British sausage texture. I think this is one of the occasions where some binder would work well as what I like about sage is how well it goes with stuffing/meat loaf and this is the direction given by adding rusk to sausages. Normally I prefer the meaty texture of a non-binded sausage over the rather spongy texture that (too much) rusk gives. But I wonder if this is an occasion where some rusk would go well.

I'm reasonably happy with the result, but I will be changing a few things the next time I make these. I will use more sage and less black pepper. I might even double the amount of sage. This could also change the texture of the sausage, for the better I hope. The sage shows up well through the casing and gives the sausage an interesting appearance. I would have liked to have used hog casings, but I am out of them at the moment and instead I am using up what I have to hand. I would like to try adding some rusk. It would be good to make some with and some without rusk to I can better judge the differences.

Chipotle Sausage

Ingredient	Grams	Percentage
pork belly	2780	96.29
salt	45	1.56
Chipotle	85	2.15

Casing: beef runners, sheep casings

Chipotle is a smoke-dried Jalapeño chilli pepper. It's not crazy hot to eat, but it has a long smoky-hot after-taste. I was given two packets of Chipotle last year as a birthday present and as an 'I saw this and thought of you' present. It's a good gift for someone like me who likes both chillies and smoked foods. Making Chipotle sausages seemed like a good choice of how to use them. I looked back at the Fresh Chorizo recipe that I had made before and substituted the amount of Pimento that I had used with roughly the same proportion of Chipotle. I left out the garlic as I thought it would be a distraction from the Chipotle. I might revisit this decision the next time.

I made two sizes of sausage: thick beef runners and thin sheep casings. The beef runners make a very wide diameter sausage. I like BIG sausage - the extra thickness emphasises the meatiness of the sausage and they look impressive. My girlfriend, on the other hand, likes thin sausage. Since I started making sausages, she has moved from 'not eating sausages' to 'eating thin sausages' so I am keen to encourage this. It was the Marmite sausages that first piqued her interest to try them.

I ground the Chipotle in the spice grinder, but only to a flaky consistency as I wanted to keep some of the texture of these large chillies. The result was quite rusk-like and I wonder if the recipe could take just a little water to plump the sausage a little more. The flaky texture of the Chipotle also adds visual interest to the sausage and the red colour comes out in the skin after 24 hours and gives them a wonderful smoked colour.

I think I got the Chipotle balance right. The sausages are quite hot and smoky when you eat them and this intensifies afterwards to a very satisfying warmth as they digest. I will definitely make these sausages again.

Pataks Madras curry paste

Ingredient	Grams	Percentage
pork belly	1000	91.32
salt	10 (+ paste)	1.18
Pataks Madras curry paste	85	7.76

Casing: beef runners

I made these sausages as a second batch of the evening. First up, I made a couple of kilos of the Alsation Christmas sausages (again) to take to a friend's 50th birthday party. I made them as mini-chipolata style sausages, the kind normally found on the end of cocktail sticks. I was right in thinking that the light and spicy taste goes well as party food.

Then I made a kilo of curry sausage, as an experiment. I'd wanted to make these curry sausages, using a shop-bought curry paste to provide the spice, for quite a while. If nothing else, I'm glad to have got it out of my system, The jar of Pataks curry paste has sat in my cupboard for the last three months and I'm glad it has finally been used.

I took a guess with the amount of salt to use. This was because the curry paste contained 4.1% salt and so I'd have had to work out a little sum to get the right amount to add. I guess because I was tired, I took a short cut and judged the amount 'by eye' rather than calculate the correct weight. I cook most meals like this and usually it works out. But when I checked later, the sausages were a few grams light on my target 1.5% and I think this came through in the taste. I have now updated my proportion spread sheet to account for added salt in products. A valuable lesson learned and an improved tool. I'll have no excuses for making this mistake again.

By chance, these sausages were stuffed into beef runners, rather than the hog casings as I had intended. I have been buying casings from a number of places and my fridge is full of many unmarked packages of casings. Usually I can tell 'by eye' which is which but this time I was caught out. Maybe it's time to get my eyes tested. I shall make sure that all casings are properly labelled in future so I won't make this mistake again. I had bought the beef runners when I was making Morcilla but I think these worked out really well in a larger casing so I shall be ordering some more and using them more often as a general purpose casing for larger and meatier sausage flavours.

The turmeric in the curry paste gave these sausages a wonderful colour, making them look as though they have been smoked.

These sausages have an interesting flavour, but it's not amazing, as I had hoped. They suffer most from a crumbly texture, which I guess is from the non-spice ingredients in the curry paste. The paste is, after all, designed to make a sauce rather than as a sausage flavouring. So I will be making curry sausages again, but next time I will be using raw spices rather than a ready-made paste.

Rilletes de porc

Ingredient	Grams	Percentage %
pork belly	1180	91.51
lard	75	5.82
salt	10	0.78
black pepper	5	0.39
fresh thyme	1.3	0.47
garlic	12	0.93
mace	1.5	0.12
bayleaf	2 leaves	-
water	200ml	-

Rillettes are so easy to make. And so very, very delicious.

My good friends in Lyon introduced me to this French dish of shredded pork in lard. What could be simpler than pork slowly cooked in its own fat, cooled and spread on fresh bread. I think that part of the joy of this dish comes from the texture that the pork gets from being shredded rather than blended like a regular pate. And the pork fat that gives whole thing its richness and a creaminess. It makes a great starter, snack, breakfast, appetizer etc. Essentially it's a confit and designed for preservation of the meat, but it tastes so good it doesn't last for long. There's always an excuse to go back for just one more taste.

Rillettes are made with or without the spice. I love both, but tend to favour the spiced version as shown here. The spices added are varying mixtures of nutmeg/mace/clove. I didn't add any clove to this batch and I think that just a hint would have good.

The method is easy - remove the skin and dice the belly into approximately 1cm cubes. Add all ingredients to a pan and simmer slowly for 3 hours. When finished, separate liquid from meat and shred the meat well with a couple of forks. Stuff into a container and pour over the sieved fat to just cover the meat. Allow to cool and store in the fridge.

The meat should be just covered throughout the cooking. If it looks like it needs some more liquid, add a little boiling water or some more lard. As it cooks, the fat in the pork belly renders and the water evaporates. With careful control of the lid of the pan, you can end up with all the water evaporated and just the fat remaining. This is ideal for pouring over the meat after shredding. If there is water left in the liquid, allow the liquid to stand and cool a little to separate off the fat.

Some recipes add the thyme (or other herbs) chopped in with meat. I prefer to cook the thyme in a muslin bag so they can be discarded. Sometimes I like green herb flecks in meat, but not in rillettes. Maybe because it is served cold.

Once the pork has been cooked, shredded and packed in a pot, the fat is poured over. This fills the spaces between the meat and forms a seal over the top. If the pork belly used is particularly fatty, you can get away without adding extra lard. I have been caught short before without sufficient fat to form the cover. They just don't breed pigs with as much fat as they used to. The fat is definitely part of the dish - it helps preserve the meat and gives it the rich creaminess.

Marmite and Christmas Spice (again)

Ingredient	Grams	Percentage %
pork belly	2810	97.56
salt	45	1.56
black pepper	10	0.35
sugar	8	0.28
cloves	1.3	0.05
ginger dried	3	0.10
nutmeg	1	0.03
cinamon	2	0.07

Recently I have made a couple of batches of the Marmite sausages and the Alsation Christmas sausages. I have been playing about with the recipes, varying the balance of spices each time. I am starting to feel that I should be trying something new and radical rather than repeating recipes that I have already made. But they both taste so good!

Now, when I make a batch of sausages, I record the ingredients proportions in a simple spreadsheet that shows the percentage weight for each ingredient. This makes it easy to recreate the recipe when the quantity of meat is known only at the last minute.

I made a batch of Marmite sausages to take for a weekend away with friends. They went down well. Then I made some more when I got back, for some other friends that could not come away with us. For this second batch, I had run out of black pepper. Rather than go out to the shops to get some more, I noticed that I had plenty of white pepper available so I decided to substitute. Big mistake. White pepper is much hotter and more acrid than the lovely sweet black pepper that I had used before. I might have got away with it if I had reduced the amount, but the end result was simply to (white) peppery. I'm amazed it's taken me this long to really appreciate the difference between white and black pepper.

The other change I have been making to the Marmite sausages is slowly increasing the Marmite content each time (reducing the salt accordingly as I go). I'm now up to 3.8% Marmite and they taste great. I still think they can take some more.

The last thing I have achieved is to learn how to string my links together into traditional 'threes'. Just like a proper butcher! I was especially pleased that I worked it out by myself, rather than researching it on Google. It seems that those hours spent practising my rope work from my boating days is still paying dividends.