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.

Italian Sausage with Fennel 2

1.6kg pork shoulder
0.5kg hard pork fat
30g salt
15g ground black pepper
15g crushed garlic
7g whole fennel seed
3g ground fennel seed
125ml iced water

This is a slightly simplified version of the recipe I used last time.

I was more delicate with the pork fat this time and spent some time chilling it in the freezer to make it easier to handle and with less chance of smearing. This made a big improvement in the way the fat handled. I think it would work straight from frozen too, which is something I should try the next time I use a recipe that calls for pork fat.

I also cubed the fat with a knife rather than putting it though the mincer. I don't know it this was strictly necessary, but I was pleased with the result. However, it did take an age, so next time the fat will be minced in the machine from frozen.

These sausages were taken to a friend's bbq and went down very well. I love 'em.

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.