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.