For all you tired, you poor winter-weary masses, yearning to breathe fire, I bring you tidings of great joy: you can make your nduja and enjoy it in the same day!

“And-Do-Your-Worst!” means many things.  It’s the Retort Courteous, a riposte to my good friends Scott and Porsha, who have turned up the heat once again in the nduja wars.  (Where would we be without friends to challenge us to try new things, to egg us on, to say “You think that was crazy?  Just watch this!!”)  Over at his Sausage Debauchery blog, Scott posted this past week about his latest batch of nduja, in which a full one-third of the mix consisted of hot chilis.  No slouch, Porsha cut into her nduja, whipped up an nduja burger, and has now unleashed upon an unsuspecting world the nduja chocolate truffle.

“And-Do-Your-Worst!” also tells you how to pronounce my new creation, my secret weapon: nduja-wurst.  Dat’s right, I’m dropping da bomb, unleashing the weapon to make all other weapons obsolete.  While a traditional nduja salame can take days to ferment and then the better part of a year to smoke and slowly dry out, imagine an nduja sausage that is ready to eat the same day you mix it up and that tastes every bit as good or, dare I say it?, even better! 

This is not my first attempt at a meatier and mellower version of nduja.  Back in the spring, I created an nduja pâté, which got rave reviews, and just a couple weeks ago Scott inspired me to make a mortadella with the same Calabrian chilis that go into nduja.  I liked this emulsion-sausage version, which we christened ndujadella, but missed the liver and the garnish of sweet, roasted red peppers that went into the pâté as well as the deep smokiness of the original, slow-cured salame.  Then inspiration struck (or full-blown insanity descended, depending on your point of view): why not make a liverwurst, which traditionally gets hot-smoked, but season it with the Calabrian hot chilis Scott has in his store and garnish it with the sweet peppers? 

Such a chimera might indeed seem like a case of doing my worst, taking a mild, inoffensive sausage like liverwurst and dousing it with hot chilis.  But having been baptized in fire, this liverwurst is reborn as a glorious new creation that outshines its parents.  It has the intense, smoldering heat and smokiness of nduja, with all its rough edges smoothed over by the silky richness of liver, brightened and lightened by the sweet red peppers.

This ain’t your grandfather’s liverwurst, but then he probably didn’t listen to rock ‘n’ roll either!  Spread on one of Stewart’s bagels and bathe in the glow of the Calabrian heat.

Scott, over at Sausage Debauchery, has been my supplier, my dealer, my main man, for all things Calabrian (and, with his new, virtual store has now become my go-to-guy for all hard-to-find Italian food items).  He recently got a crazy request from the owner of Coluccio’s, where he gets the chili peppers that go into nduja.  The owner gave him some lardo, some pancetta, and some guanciale, and told Scott to make him some nduja with those.  Fuoco! As Scott asked in his appeal for help, what kind of clusterf**k of a salame was he supposed to make with all of that?!

Then inspiration struck: he wants crazy? He came to the right guys; we can show him crazy!  If nduja is known as the “the red nutella” because it’s often spread on grilled bread, then why not come up with an ndujatella, a cooked version that would be ready to eat right away?  Since I enjoy making emulsified sausages, like mortadella, while Scott has sworn off them, he put me in charge, and this is what I came up with: the same, basic procedures as mortadella, only Calabrian chilis (both concentrate and powder) substituted for the usual, delicate spices.  Ndujadella was born!  And, as if all those “picantissimo” chilis weren’t enough, why not add some cubes of pork tongue, marinated in my Thai chili fire water?

So, while my nduja di buffala (made with bison meat) ferments, dries, and mellows for a few more weeks, and while my nduja classico (the latest batch made with 50% more hot peppers than the previous one!) needs a few more months, this lighter, less spicy, intro or “gateway” version of nduja is ready to eat now.  It’s soft enough that you can still spread it on toast.  (Try it with some of Stewart’s chipotle and sun-dried tomato bread!)  Fry it up with some scrambled eggs.  Or just cut it into chunks and eat it as an appetizer – you’ll find, surprisingly, that the hot chilis actually accentuate the fruit in red wine!

Every time you make something, hopefully, you learn something more or something new, and the final product gets better and better, until – “Bam!” or “Basta!” – everything is kicked up to moltissimo mode.

Emulsion sausages are the most elegant and refined in the Charcutier’s repertoire – and the biggest pain in butt to make!  Meat, fat, and ice are minced in a food processor over a period of 15 minutes or more, threatening to overload all but the most robust motors and to make the mother of all messes.  (Scott, over at Sausage Debauchery, made it once and says, “Nevuh-fukking-uh-gen!”  And temperature is critical.  First, all the ingredients must be frozen or semi-frozen, to allow as much time as possible for processing, and then the temperature must be watched like a hawk, as it starts to climb quickly at the end.  Go over 60º F, the emulsion will break, fat will separate out during cooking, the remaining sausage will be dry and crumbly, and all you get for your trouble is a sausage that breaks your heart.

The recipe in Ruhlman and Polcyn’s Charcuterie book is sized for what a Cuisinart can handle, but only makes a 3-pound sausage.  And, lemme tell ya, it’s not worth going to all that trouble and risking a broken heart for just 3 pounds of sausage, even if, like me, you consider Mortadella the king of emulsion sausages.

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Meat Geek is a new series of posts that I’m starting to focus specifically on charcuterie ingredients and processes, old and new.  This series is for anyone, like me, who wants to understand about the science as well as the technique (the “why” as well as the “how”), and who is always interested in learning more – even from their mistakes.  And, hey, if you’re just looking to pick up some new conversational gambits (such as “Whoa!  The protein matrix in that baloney looks seriously denatured!”) this is your source.  (It may be hard to believe, given my rep, but I still turn heads when I announce, “Gotta get home and ferment my sausage!” or “My beef bungs are waiting to be unpacked!”)

Sodium phosphates have been approved by the USDA as a food additive and are commonly used as an emulsifier to prevent fat from separating out in foods such as processed cheeses and meats, but also in soups, soup powders, and even instant oatmeal.  The interesting thing, for us meatheads, is that sodium phosphates work to stabilize sausages such as baloney (where finely comminuted fat particles are dispersed in a mixture of water and meat fibers), even though, strictly speaking, the meat mixture is not an emulsion.  As C. Lynn Knipe emphasizes in her succinct article on Phosphates as Meat Emulsion Stabilizers, “a true emulsion is a stable suspension of two liquids (oil and water), which are not normally soluble in each other.”  Whereas the “meat emulsion” in a sausage like baloney is more properly described “as a matrix, whose stability is dependent upon the water-holding capacity or binding capacity of the meat proteins in the matrix.”

That’s where sodium phosphates come in.  In several specific ways, they keep the meat mixture from losing moisture during cooking, and the fewer meat juices you have leaking out, taking flavor with them, the moister, more tender, and more flavorful the final sausage.

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Frankly, I don’t know what to call this sausage, other than scrumptious.  It was the surprise hit of our holiday tasting party, with many people asking if it was available through the club.  It is now!  To come up with a new name for this new sausage, I’ll give 10 bucks off the next order of whoever comes up with the best name for it!

Fritz Sonnenschmidt calls the forcemeat Gelbwurst, “gold or golden sausage,” which is the name for a Bavarian sausage, usually made from pork and veal, and considered a fairly bland, light, low-sodium and low-fat, “diet” bologna.  Fritz’s recipe lightens it still further (in color at least), by substituting turkey for the pork and veal, yet lards it by making it an emulsion sausage with a much higher percentage of fat.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I ramped it up further, increasing the spices he calls for.

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Mortadella, as I am fond of saying, is what baloney wants to be when it grows up.

Baloney is actually the Americanized name for Bologna, the town in the center of Emilia-Romagna, that became famous for and then synonomous with this sausage as early as the fourteenth-century. The best guess about where the name Mortadella comes from is that it’s derived from the same roots as the word mortar, which is where the meat would have been pounded into a smooth paste in the days before food processors. And having got my new food processor last week, this is just the sausage I wanted to make in order to see what it could handle.

Although we tend to think of emulsified meats (think hot dogs and baloney) as the Wonder Bread of sausages, they are actually quite demanding to make and delicious when done right. As I’ve written before, what makes this kind of sausage so creamy and delicate is finely comminuting the fat and suspending it in a matrix of meat proteins. When you do this, a lot can go wrong. This is where the masochism comes in: pushing your equipment to its limits, making a huge mess, only in order to learn, sometimes, about one more way to mess things up, one more way things can go wrong.

Not enough chopping leaves you with something more like a sausage than an emulsion. Too much chopping can reduce the fat particles to the point where they present more surface area than the soluble proteins can stabilize in an emulsion. Overheating is also your enemy. The food processor heats the mix as it chops it, and if the temperature exceeds 68º F, the emulsion can break. The cooking also needs to be as delicate as possible. My Mortadella sausages poach in pork broth, in closed pâté pans, which are turn set into a roasting pan of hot water, which is in turn placed in a very low (200º F) oven, until they reach an internal temperature of just 150º F – a process that takes 2-3 hours.

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Nothing quite breaks your heart like a broken emulsion. It’s bad enough when it’s a mayonnaise that you’ve been whisking for awhile, but when its’ a twelve-pound batch of sausage that you’ve spent a month planning, a week getting ready, and an entire day working on… Well, let’s just say that it’s a good thing we don’t keep any guns in the house.

An emulsion involves two liquids that normally don’t want to mix; when you get one to stay dispersed in the other, without separating or “breaking,” it thickens up and emulsifies. The kind of emulsions cooking is concerned with are almost always fat and water–think of oil and vinegar in salad dressing or the oil and little bit of liquid in mayonnaise. When it comes to emulsified sausages, the fat is usually pork fat, dispersed in liquid, usually water. To disperse the meat fat it has to be pounded or chopped for quite awhile, and to keep the emulsion from breaking, everything has to be kept cold, so the water starts out as crushed ice. Finally, you also need an emulsifier to keep the molecules from just clumping back together in pools of oil and water–in this case, skim milk powder. Whip these together so that the fat molecules break down and stay dispersed in the water, control the temperature so that the emulsion never “breaks,” and the result is a very fine, light and delicate–almost creamy–sausage. If the emulsion breaks, as this one did during cooking, the sausage becomes drier and chewier and ends up surrounded by a layer of fat around the casing. It still tastes alright, but the texture and appearance are unacceptable, so I’ve taken it off the club offerings. If any TLP members would still like to try some, I’d be happy to include a piece for free with your order.

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