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.

This is not a Saveloy

1.5 Kg twice fine minced pork shoulder
25g salt
5g white pepper
2g ground cardamom
1g ground mace
10g ground paprika
10g beetroot powder
Hog casings

This turned out to be my first sausage-making failure. Although the end product was both edible and wonderfully spiced, these sausages had a dry texture and were nothing like Saveloys. It was my fault for not following the recipe properly.

My sister came to stay and brought my electric mincer back. I have never used it since I bought it, about 8 years ago, and then lent it to her. I got distracted by the novelty of using it and forgot that the recipe instructed the meat be twice fine-minced. For some reason, I chose to coarse mince the meat just once. It's weird that I should have made this mistake as I had already noted that a Saveloy is an emulsified-type sausage and would need a fine texture. A Saveloy is essentially an English version of the Frankfurter.

Still, I was very pleased with the way the electric mincer performed. Much better than tiring my shoulder with the manual mincer. And the mincing done in a quarter of the time.

So I ended up with some weird looking, lumpy-bumpy and quite dry sausages. The poaching shrunk the skin tight to the coarse meat and emphasised the rugged texture. No 'Sav' should look like this!

The beetroot powder hardly gave the promised colour to the sausage. Next time I will double the quantity.

I had another taste-changing experience using the spices. When I first made these sausages I cooked and ate one. Although I was dismayed with the texture, shape and colour, I was delighted with the taste. The spices were very vibrant and exciting. A few days later, when I tried them again, the spices were much more subtle and the flavour of the pork dominated. It's interesting to track the change of the taste of sausages by eating them over the coarse of a week. It takes a while for the flavours to balance which can mean they become stronger or, as in this case, dilute. Another thing I notice is that freezing dulls the taste a little. The defrosted sausages still taste great, but they lack the vibrancy of the pre-frozen part of the batch.

Morcilla

150g dried pig blood
900 ml water
500g hard pork back fat
400g dry Arborio rice, cooked
100g onion, fine chopped
10g garlic, crushed
5g thyme
10g Pimentón (sweet smoked paprika)
50g salt
5g black pepper
beef runners

Making Morcilla (Spanish black pudding) is a big deal for me. I have been a fan of blood sausage for a long time now and it's the texture I love as much as the taste. I also warm to the 'waste no part of the animal' attitude of its origins. It's an odd journey for someone like me, raised to eat neither pork nor blood products. I wonder if there are other Jewish black-pudding fans out there? Maybe we should start a club. Or a support group?

This is a different type of product to a fresh meat sausage so for me it represents yet another new branch of my sausage-making experiences. Like Boudin Blanc, Morcilla is a pre-cooked sausage. These spent an hour and 20 minutes poaching in water at 80 degrees C. I am going to have to get a bigger pot for this kind of thing, as my largest pot is a domestic pressure-cooker base and it could barely cope with the load.

Again, I chose to use a recipe from The Sausage Book. I have seen other recipes for making blood sausage that use just a funnel, nozzle and ladle to get the blood mixture into the casings. No stuffer required. But with this recipe, the rice gives the pre-cooked sausage a firm rather than a runny texture such that a sausage stuffer is needed to get the mixture into the casings. The rice is not noticeable in the finished sausage which has a light and fluffy-yet-sticky texture; something that I enjoy about black pudding.

My biggest problem came with tying off the links. These need to be tied off with string rather than just twisting the casing like a regular sausage. This is partly because the mixture is more runny than sausage meat and also the beef runners are thicker walled than hog casings and more likely to open. I tried to use lightweight cooking twine but it was not up to the job and kept breaking. The result was that one of my puddings spilled its contents into the poaching pan. A terrible loss. Next time I will invest in some butchers' string and tie them off properly.

I don't know if the thyme is right in this recipe. There is not enough to make a difference to taste, so next time I will either leave it out or increase the quantity. Maybe some rosemary would work well along side it.

This is the first time that I got to use beef runners to make sausage. I have enough left for another batch and then I will try using beef middles to see the difference in size and shape it produces.

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