Toulouse encore

2kg pork belly
30g salt
8g black pepper
15g garlic
11g parsley
6g sage
5g thyme
2.5 g nutmeg
100ml red wine
sheep casings
I made another batch of Toulouse sausages to take to a friend's bbq. I played about with the spices and reduced the amount of garlic in the recipe. I love garlic, I really do, but I have noticed that the recipes in The Sausage Book are garlic overkill to the point of obliterating rather than enhancing the taste of the meat.
I made this batch using sheep casings because I have run out of the larger hog casings. I used to think that I preferred the larger casings as they seem more 'meaty'. This aligns with my preference for a rough rather than a finely minced filler. But it just depends what mood I am in and these thin Toulouse sausages turned out lovely and I was very happy to nibble them rather than feel they needed to be carved.
A new pack of hog casings are now on order, along with some curing spice #1 to make some bacon. Making bacon will be my next project and it is an easy start into the world of curing and charcuterie. I have just bought Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing and I'm eager to see what use I can make of it.

Alsation Christmas Sausage

2.0kg pork belly
30g salt
5g ground black pepper
5g sugar
12 cloves
1g (1/4 teaspoon) ground ginger
1g (1/4 teaspoon) ground cinnamon
0.5g (3/8 teaspoon) ground nutmeg:
sheep casings

Because I am just starting out making sausages, I'm still very keen to try new techniques and new recipes. The possibilities seem endless. The chance to explore and experiment is an exciting aspect of food and cooking that I enjoy. I saw this Christmas sausage recipe at Sausage Mania and it caught my imagination. I like the notion of a Christmas sausage, especially as it is only the end of April. When winter comes, I love to drink mulled wine and this recipe uses much the same spices.

I fine minced the pork belly for this sausage. This is the first time I have used the fine mesh on my mincer. I figure it is in keeping with the smaller diameter of the sheep casing.

I got some more lovely pork belly from Gog Magog Hills butchers and this time I asked them not to score the skin. It makes taking it off the belly much easier. One sausage-making friend made his first batch of sausages without first removing the skin from the pork belly. He wasn't impressed with the result.

Once the skin is off, it's ready for scoring and making into some bonus crackling. I prepared this piece and put it in the freezer for another day when I will take it to share with my girlfriend. It has been noted that I had selfishly eaten the previous one all by myself.

There's no garlic in this sausage and, along with the Christmas spices, the result is a very un-meaty sausage. The spice and fine mincing gives this sausage a light taste and texture. It's quite un-sausage-like, which is a bit weird but very good. I imagine that children or recovering vegetarians would like this sausage. I'd like to do something like this again, but with fewer and heavier spices. Maybe full-on fresh ginger and clove? 12 cloves for this amount of meat is about right, though maybe it could be taken back a little. I think I will soon be experimenting with chilli as a sausage spice. And why no go the whole hog and make a Vindaloo sausage? It's easy to get carried away dreaming up exotic spices, but I think I need to remember that the primary intention should be to enhance the meat rather than distract from it.

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.