According to some sources, butchers (and, presumably sausage makers) have three patron saints: St. Adrian, St. George and St. Peter the Apostle. Unfortunately for butchers, these saints have quite a large number of other constituents who may have once also wielded knives - including soldiers - who likely have priority over the lowly meat cutter.
For those who prefer their patron saints living and non-denominational, there is only one true patron saint of the sausage, or, more broadly, the encased meat:
Doug Sohn, encaser of the encased, feeder of the hungry
As Doug's t-shirts and website and wall of his restaurant read, "There are no two finer words in the the English language than 'encased meat', my friend." Taking this as a mandate for a spring dinner, My partner in food crime, Mary Reilly of Cooking4theWeek, and I set to work encasing meats, she tackling the mammals and I taking on fowl.
And as luck would have it, the first Red Sox-Yankees match up of the year was falling on the same day. Okay, so it would be the third game of the match up, but it was the first series. And for that reason alone, my friends and I - Red Sox haters and indifferent included - had a reason to get together, eat some encased meats and french fries cooked in duck fat, and watch a few innings of the game. Or at least listen to Rem-dog call it on the radio.
Making Sausage
The real work of the dinner was the actual sausage making. Mary, armed with a sausage attachment for her KitchenAid, made quick work of the grinding and stuffing:
My methods were more primitive; I don't own a sausage attachment, and even if I did, it would have been boxed away in storage with the rest of my things three miles up the road in one of those pay-by-the-month places.
So I opted for the slightly more cumbersome and time consuming but equally effective pastry bag method.
Making sausage at home is actually quite simple - you don't need fancy grinding and stuffing equipment to make it work. As long as you have a food processor, a stand mixer (or the desire to stir a whole bunch with a wooden spoon), a pastry bag with a round tip and an elastic band, you too can make your own beautiful, professional-looking sausages. You'll also need hog or lamb casings, which you can usually get through your local butcher.
There are three easy steps to making sausage:
1. Grind seasoned meat in food processor
2. Develop stickiness by mixing it by hand or with a stand mixer (such as a KitchenAid)
3. Using a pastry bag fitted with a wide round tip, fill casings then twist into sausage portions
3a. Cook as you like
The basic ratio for sausage, according to Michael Ruhlman is 3 parts meat to 1 part fat (which means the ideal sausage is at least 25% fat, excluding any extra fat the meat you use has in it). The seasoning is up to you. As long as you stick with this ratio (and grind and mix the meat properly) you'll get a great result.
If you have time, season your meat and leave it overnight. Keep your meat as cold as possible, using frozen chunks if it gets too warm in your kitchen.
My basic recipe for all my fresh chicken sausages:
- 3 lbs Chicken Thigh, fat left on
- 1 lb Finely GROUND Chicken skin with fat intact (if you buy chicken thighs with skin on, what you have in the package should be enough. If you eat pork, sub 1 lb fatback)
- 1T + 2 t salt
PLUS flavoring - you can use liquor, beer, liqueur, spices, herbs, vegetables, cheese - really anything of your choosing.
Food Processor Method:
Twenty-four hours before you are going to make your sausage, cut your chicken into chunks and season with your spices and herbs and any liquid ingredients you are using. Allow to sit overnight in the refrigerator. About 2 hours before using, place chicken in freezer.
1. Grind Chicken in food processor. Pulse until meat is fairly finely ground but NOT consistently sized. Remove half of the mixture and place it in the bowl of your stand mixer or, if you don't have one, in a bowl. Pulse the remainder AND the chicken skin in the bowl of the processor until finely ground. Add to the chicken already in the stand mixer.
2. In your stand mixer fitted with a paddle (see below) mix for 1 minute (just combined) to five minutes on medium speed to develop the myosin in the meat - the protein that promotes stickiness and creates a more desirable texture. If you don't have a stand mixer, stir vigorously with a wooden spoon for about 2 minutes. Just as effective though more messy, use your hands and knead the farce (the sausage filling) for a minute or two - make sure, however, that your hands stay cold.
3. Whether or not you are using a stand mixer, you'll want to fold in your vegetables, cheeses, whole herbs, etc now. If you are using mushrooms, you'll see a rather speckled mixture, as below.
4. Mix on lowest speed until the veg/cheese/herb mixture is completely combined. And then...
TEST, TEST, TEST your sausage first. Saute it in a pan and make sure it is seasoned to your liking. If not, adjust.
5. If you are satisfied with your mixture, pull out your piping bag fitted with a round tip - it should be a WIDE tip (like an 808 Round Tip, which will work for hog casing but will be too big for lamb casing), but not so wide that your casing won't fit at least half-way up the tip as you'll need to push the casing up (beware, unintentionally suggestive photos follow). You don't need to fill the bag before attaching the casing, but it doesn't make a huge difference if you do. Remember, before using your casings, soak them in cold water for at least 30 minutes and then rinse them out completely inside and out as if they were hoses.
Half-fill the pastry bag (any size will do - I use a smaller bag because it is easy to handle) with the sausage mixture. Shake down the bag so the mixture gets a little more compact in the bag and push out the air. If some mixture comes out, put it back down into the bag.
You'll want to make sure you leave enough casing at the end to tie a knot once you have filled the casing.
6. Now. start applying pressure to the bag (try and keep your hand on the end of the casing near the pastry bag, just in case the elastic isn't in a mood to do its job). The meat mixture will start filling the casing. Hold the end of the casing and draw it out as it fills.
Don't overfill the casing - you'll want enough slack to be able to twist it into portions once your are done filing it. Once it is completely filled, tie at knot at one end, and make your first sausage twist about 4-6 inches up from there. Try to be consistent with your sizes. Twist the first one toward you. The next twist should be away from you. The twist after that should be toward you, repeating away/toward/away until you have no more sausage left to twist.
It will look like this, but probably more consistently sized (I made a number of different sizes for different uses...or something):
7. At this point the sausages should be allowed to air dry for about an hour in a COOL place - but only if you have time and inclination. It isn't a must. But if you have time, hang them up in a cool room and point a fan directly at them for 1 hour.
You don't need to do this step. Your sausage is ready to be cooked - the drying helps with grilling, roasting, smoking or frying but isn't that helpful if you are going to cook the sausage in beer, confit them in fat, or use another wet preparation.And your grill and friends will be very forgiving. Trust me on this. My friends were.
Raw, the sausage will only last a couple days (it is raw meat, after all). If you confit the sausage, they will hold under fat for up to a week. Cooking in an acidic medium (beer, wine, etc) and leaving them in the cooking liquid will also keep the sausages good for several days.
You can also make the sausage farce (stuffing) in advance, keep it cool in your refrigerator and use it only when ready, presumably within 24 hours:
If I have made too much, I'll cook the sausage and freeze them. They freeze well. They can also be frozen raw - just remember to label your bag properly to avoid cross-contamination.
If your guests or you do not wish to eat hog or lamb casing, you can make plastic casing from plastic wrap. Just spread some plastic wrap out, spread a line of sausage filling across it in the middle if possible, and, using a straight edge like a small cutting board, shape it into a cylinder. Once it is made, you can let it sit overnight before you cook it, or freeze it. The first cooking should be steaming - gently steam the sausage in a pan. Once they are steamed, you can cook them any way you like, with the plastic removed, of course.
The sausages made in the plastic casing come out nicely, hold together, and do not need extra binding agents added unless they have not been mixed enough to develop a sturdy emulsion.
Party Preparations
For the party, I ended up making four kinds of sausage - Chicken Paprika, Apple and Cheddar; Chicken and Spring Ramps, Shiitake Mushrooms and Garlic; Chicken with Taleggio and Tarragon; and Duck Sausage with Prunes in Cognac and Foie Gras. Mary, always ambitious, made three very different types of sausage: Gyro Lamb Sausage, Churrasco Beef Sausage, and Banh-Mi Style Pork Sausage.
We both designed our sausage presentations - the sauces and the breads and the condiments. The menus, which I placed around the house, made clear the purpose of our dinner: Sox and Sausages:
Along with the sausage, I made ketchup, mustard, sauerkraut, pickles, tapenade and cabbage and carrot salad. My mother made her famous (at least amongst my sister and me) hot clam dip. There's something just so 70s about hot clam dip. Mary and I made the sauces and condiments for our respective sausages. Mary even made a moist (and gluten-free) Brazilian-style pan queijo.
Here's my "Olive Bar Tapenade" - basically 3/4 lb of pitted olives and anything else that looks good on the olive bar at Whole Foods or similar upscale market, blended together - served with some homemade bread toasts dusted with Za'atar.
The 48-Hour Pickles (cukes + vinegar + salt + sugar + water + spices - no time for a nice fermented pickle, sadly):
And the cabbage and carrot salad (don't call it Cole Slaw - there was not a lick of mayo to be found anywhere):
Ambitions Nearly Thwarted: Duck Fat Fries
My one major ambition for the night was to make and serve hot, fresh hand-cut french fries cooked in duck fat. And this ambition, would, for me, prove to be my achilles heel.
Finding the fat was easy. My local butcher, Concord Prime, keeps duck fat in stock and was able to sell me 6 lbs of the stuff, enough for my evening of deep fat debauchery.
But I was missing two keys to having my fries ready to go at the sounding of the dinner bell: time and a deep fryer.
For fries to be crisp - really crisp - you need to blanch them in 325 degree F fat first and then turn the heat up to 375 and fry them until crisp and golden. But almost day-long event at Taza Chocolate in Somerville, ending just an hour before the dinner, would make advanced work impossible for me. That and the lack of a deep fryer.
At 4:15, 45 minutes prior to the arrival of the guests, Mary arrived with her sausages and her turkey deep fryer.
At 4:45 we still had not set it up.
At 5:00 the fat was beginning to melt. Guests began to arrive. Hi Rich! Melissa! Adam! Bekka! Elliott! Seth arrived an hour later. Rebecca 2 and Amy arrived even later, thanks to faulty directions from Google Maps.
At 5:15 we were able to turn the deep fryer on at the base of the stairs on a slab of concrete. I would not be burning down my house today, thank you very much:
Meanwhile, at the top of the stairs on the deck, Mary started cooking some majestic-looking sausages (I went for tiny-sized with the hope that my guests would have the opportunity to try many. Mary went for the volume play).
While she cooked, I blanched and fussed with the extremely thick fries. I blamed my mutton-handedness on my aching wrists - I had been madly cooking for days and between the sausage fest and prepping and shooting a series of How-tos (for How2Heroes) and I just didn't have it in me to cut the perfect bistro fries.
They were sort of clunky:
Cooking took a long time. A very long time:
I had an audience:
Which broke up the monotony of frying batch after batch of slightly-too-large duck fat fries:
Meanwhile, Mary tended the grill and served up lamb, beef and pork sausages.
My baked beans, which were actually stove top beans, sat unloved on the stove top next to the grill:
Turns out people really aren't into baked beans, even when they can locate them on the buffet table. Except for my mom, who ate them to humor me.
My sausages, which I'd placed on a sizzle platter on the grill, were slightly charred and overcooked by the time I came up for air. The duck fat fries (and the fear of burning the fries, the dog, or the kid) kept me virtually a prisoner of the deep fryer.
Oops. I still managed to sample a few (they tasted good!) and dish out a couple more, dressed, to the hapless guests. Chicken Paprika sausage with Apple and cheddar, topped with Romesco and a yogurt and pickle sauce:
This plate had a little bit of everything - duck fat fries, 'baked' beans, duck foie gras sausage with apple slaw & pine nuts and grainy mustard, Chicken paprika sausage, and a lone banh-mi style sausage with some of Mary's not-so-secret sauce. Mary made a few composed salads, too, which were a big hit - chayote-avocado salad and white bean salad. Notice the baseball themed plates? Go Sox!
Mary's sausages were utterly gorgeous:
The hit of the party was Mary's Banh-Mi Pork Sausage. Here's how she put it together:
Banh Mi Sausage
Inspired by the flavors in a banh mi sandwich, this sausage is great on a baguette with traditional banh mi accompaniments.
For each pound of ground pork (Mary used ground pork butt), mix together
- 1 pound ground pork
- 2 cloves garlic, minced
- 2 teaspoons Sriracha
- 1/4 cup minced cilantro
- 2 tablespoons fish sauce
- 2 tablespoons brown sugar
- 1 tablespoon lime juice
Accompaniments: baguette for sandwiches, shredded carrot, shredded daikon, pickled shallots, chopped cilantro, sliced cucumber, Mary's banh mi sauce (recipe follows) and fish sauce
Mix everything together well and then fry up a small portion (about a tablespoon) to check seasoning. Add more saltiness with additional fish sauce, more heat with Sriracha, etc. There should be a pronounced sweetness from the brown sugar: if not add more.
Stuff into sausage casings if you wish. Alternatively, as more easily, you can more handfuls into patties. Grill or pan fry until cooked through.
Serve on a baguette with your choice of accompaniments.
Mary's banh mi sauce
Far from authentic Vietnamese. This sauce provides a nice creamy, spicy addition to the sandwich. Stir together:
- 1/4 cup mayonnaise
- 2 tablespoons fish sauce
- generous squirt of Sriracha (depending on how much heat you want)
- squeeze of lime juice
Taste and adjust seasoning by tweaking the ingredient amounts. The sauce should be creamy from the mayonnaise with an earthiness from the fish sauce and a goodly amount of heat.
For dessert I served some gluten-free treats - whoopie pies and cupcakes, left over from my How2Heroes shoot:
and Mary made brown sugar & walnut marshmallows:
Oh yeah. And about the game? Remember, the Sox-Yankees match-up? We won. Squarely.
