While dabbling with the blood of sacrifice, don’t think I haven’t been feasting as well!

I’ve wanted to make blood sausage ever since I read Jeffrey Steingarten’s essay, “It Takes a Village to Kill a Pig,” where he places boudin noir in his pantheon of “the hundred greatest foods of the world” (de-throning the frozen Milky Way bar!).  I had a chance to eat some last spring, when I was in London and came across a shop selling charcuterie from organic, English meats.  It was ghastly – mealy in texture, with no redeeming flavor.  To get a good boudin, it seemed, I was going to have to make it myself.

Which is not as easy as you might think.  Although it is legal to sell pig’s blood in the US, the slaughterhouse has to have special equipment and has to be specially certified, which almost nobody bothers to do.  As a result, about the only place you can find pig’s blood is at an Asian market, where it will be frozen.  But I wanted fresh blood.  Following the centuries-old tradition of French farmhouses (which you can also find beautifully documented in the opening pages of Stéphane Reynaud’s cookbook, Pork & Sons), I wanted to make boudin on the same day that the pig was slaughtered and encase it in the pig’s own intestines.

(more…)

When the end of summer brings tomatoes faster than you can eat them, what do you do?  Dry them and preserve them in olive oil!  What do you do with these dried little gems?  What could be better than Bruce Aidell’s recipe for a fresh Italian sausage made with turkey?

When I made my milk run down to the Amish area around Arthur, Illinois, last month, I stopped by Central Illinois Poultry Processing and picked up a bunch of their ground turkey.  This is the second poultry sausage that I promised to satisfy ¡Shazam!’s craving for some end of summer grilling.  (Cook some up tonight and bring it to Zelma’s to put on top of their $3 large pizza, and you’ll be all set!)

7 lbs ground turkey
1 lb pork backfat
2/3 cup dried tomatoes in olive oil, chopped
½ cup dry white wine
6 tb minced garlic
¼ cup toasted fennel seeds
2 tb freshly ground black pepper
3 tb kosher salt
2 tsp red pepper flakes
2 tsp sugar

If you’re grinding your own turkey, it goes through a 3/8-inch die.  I grind the fat through a 1/4-die to get it a little finer.  All the ingredients get mixed in a stand mixer for several minutes to blend and develop the protein in the meat. This is also much lower fat than the traditional pork version of Italian sausage, so if you’re reducing the fat in your diet, this is the sausage for you.

For more than a month now, ¡Shazam!® has been requesting and patiently waiting for some chicken sausages. Here is my first answer to her request and I hope it’s good enough to make her forget about the wait.

I don’t cook nearly enough of it, but I love the bright, fiery flavors of Thai food, where searing red chilis are balanced by the cooling green flavors of cilantro and lime. So when I saw Bruce Aidell had a recipe for a Thai chicken and turkey sausage in his Complete Sausage Book, I knew I had to try it.

For the heat, his version calls for red pepper flakes and cayenne pepper. But I’m growing these beautiful Thai chilis in my garden this summer, so I substituted them instead. Before adding them to the sausage, Big Red and I put microtome slices on our tongue to trial them, and (with 2-3 times the heat of a cayenne pepper) it felt like our tongues had been drilled through by a pinpoint laser hit; an entirely pleasurable laser burn, mind you. Rest assured, we went easy on the chilis in the sausage mix, figuring we could always add more. The amount we used (7-8 of these petit, half-inch chilis), gave the sausage a little background heat, but we decided not to overwhelm the complex flavors and the fresh, clean taste of the herbs.

The only other thing I changed was adding lime–one of my favorite components of Thai food. If I could trust myself to bring a Kaffir Lime tree indoors and keep it going through the winter, I would do it in a midwest minute. So here’s my modified recipe:

(more…)

This sausage is a tribute to the No Blog Dog. I call him that because he refuses to let me use a photo of him or his proper name on this blog. (Alas! And I have so many great photos that I’m saving up for when he’s nominated to the Supreme Court!) So the picture there to the left is the best I can do.

It’s a tribute to him because, of all the dozens of different kinds of sausages I’ve made, this one is his absolute favorite. And the secret, special ingredient of this Greek lamb sausage is orange zest. Any other resemblance is purely intentional and, well, best left to the imagination…

For this batch, I’ve tweaked it even more to his liking. The original recipe, in Bruce Aidell’s great Complete Sausage Book, calls for white wine. But, for this batch, I substituted No Blog Dog’s second favorite thing that I make: vin d’orange. Spoiler alert: I’m taking this sausage over to his place for Movie Night tomorrow (Pulp Fiction and Michael Clayton are on the bill), at which point he will commandeer every link that’s left. So order now or hold your peace, or lose your piece, or something like that . . .

Aidell’s recipe calls for a mixture of pork and lamb, but this one is all lamb, using a year-old ewe that the Joy of Illinois Farm just sent to slaughter.  Seasoned with a little, garlic, coriander, salt, and pepper, then oregano and thyme, and finally with the orange zest and vin d’orange, this is perfect for summertime or fall grilling.

According to Clifford A. Wright’s authoritative site on Mediterranean cooking, “Merguez, the French transliteration of the Arabic word mirqaz or mirkas, is a spicy small sausage used in Tunisia and Algeria.” But, as usual, Cliff’s recipe for this sausage should be taken with a grain of salt–and cumin–and coriander–and allspice–and most definitely more harisa. “Harisa,” Wright writes, “comes from the Arabic word for ‘to break into pieces,’ which is done by pounding hot chiles in a mortar, although today a food processor can be used… This famous hot chile paste is also found in the cooking of Algeria, Libya, and even in western Sicily where cùscusu is made… The simplest recipe is merely a paste of red chiles and salt that is covered in olive oil and stored.”

But then his recipe for homemade harisa calls for Guajillo and Anaheim chiles (Tunisian New Mexico chiles?), which have about half the heat of jalapenos and would make a harisa far feebler than any I’ve ever tasted, while his recipe for merguez calls for only 1 teaspoon of his tepid sauce for almost 3 pounds of meat and fat. Whoo! Cliff, don’t overdo it! Needless to say, we found it necessary to bump this up a Scoville notch or two, or ten.

(more…)

As I type this, Kent (the much-tattooed-tradesman) is installing the last part I need to get my Traulsen fridge running again.

With a week of enforced idleness on my hands, I’ve been going a little stir crazy, planning ever more varieties of sausages to make.  In addition to that, special requests have been piling up for the summer-sausage-grilling season.  So this month I’m going hog wild and making at least four different varieties of fresh sausage.

For the Lar-B-Q I tried to make some “thai smoked chicken.”  Tasty as the chickens were, I was a little disappointed  that they didn’t pick up much chili, cilantro, or lime flavors from the brine I made.  Meantime, ¡Shazam!® has been after me to make some chicken sausages for summer grilling.  So the first thing I’ll make are some chicken and turkey sausages, bursting with the flavors of fresh herbs and spices–cilantro, basil, mint, lemongrass, garlic, ginger, and lime zest–given depth with a little Thai fish sauce and green curry paste and then set alight with these tiny Thai chilis, which are twice as hot as cayenne.  Grab a Singha or the fire extinguisher of your choice!   When I work out the recipe, I’ll be sure and share it.

To make these sausages I picked up some ground turkey from the Amish-run poultry processing plant down by Arthur.  I have enough to make two kinds of sausage, so I’m also going to try an Italian-style turkey sausage out of Bruce Aidell’s Complete Sausage Book.  In addition to the traditional garlic, fennel, and red pepper flakes, his recipe calls for sun-dried tomatoes and white wine.

Last week, I also heard from the Giojas at the Joy of Illinois Farm that they had a yearling ewe they were sending to slaughter this week.  (It only produced one ram this spring, and that’s not enough to earn it’s keep on the farm.)  Since the No-Blog-Dog has been threatening me with serious bodily harm (or at least the revocation of my pool privileges) unless I make the lamb Loukanika again, I told the slaughterhouse to grind up all the lamb except for the racks.  With its generous seasonings of thyme, oregano, coriander, garlic, and orange zest, this sausage is also one of my favorites, so keep an eye out for it before the two of us snap it all up.  They will go perfectly with this year’s vintage of vin d’orange!

Finally, my sausagemaking apprentice Michaela (“You’re hired!”) has been hankering for some merguez.  This is another lamb sausage, from north Africa, seasoned with cumin and coriander, and maybe a little fennel and allspice, but definitely heated up with a good dose of harissa, their fiery red pepper paste.

This is a beautifully clean and simple breakfast sausage, which comes from Ruhlman and Polcyn’s Charcuterie book. The taste of Stan Schutte’s great pork really shines through here. Along with the rich, fresh pork taste you notice the earthy sage (from my own backyard), a little pungent garlic, and just enough salt and pepper. What you probably won’t notice, unless you look for it, is the fresh-grated ginger, but it’s there in the background, helping all the other flavors to sparkle.

I fried this patty up to check the flavor and fully intended to share it with my spouse, but, by the time I finished my “taste tests,” there was nothing left! Always a good sign . . .

This is pure, fresh sausage with no preservatives. A one-pound portion is rolled into a log, frozen, and then vacuum-sealed. You can keep it in the freezer and just cut off a slice whenever you want.

I don’t know why it is, of all the Mediterranean countries, only the Italians make much use of fennel: the bulb, the stems, the ferny leaves, the pollen, and the “seeds” or, actually, dried fruits. Belonging to the same plant family as anise, caraway, cumin, and dill, fennel may be the most versatile. Like anise, the fruits can be used to flavor liqueurs and desserts. Like caraway and dill, they can be used in bread, breadsticks, or crackers. Like cumin, they can be toasted to bring out its spicy side, and then it pairs wonderfully with meat and seafood and can even be combined with fiery chilis. My favorite may be the marriage of fennel and pork. For me, what we call “Italian sausage” is simply a celebration of this union in a sausage casing.

This month’s offering showcases the two faces of fennel–the sweet as well as the spicy. The sweet version has no heat, just garlic, red wine, a little oregano, and a tiny bit of allspice. In the spicy version, fennel mixes it up with both red pepper flakes and cayenne, as well as tangling with its cousin, in the form of a dash of anise liqueur. These are rich, fatty sausages. Grill them, serve with cooked onions and peppers, and let the grease run down your chin. Or serve them with pasta. Tonight, we fried up the crumbled sausage, then cooked portobello mushrooms, onions and carrots in the fat, then tossed them all with hearty whole wheat pasta, and served with a little cheese. Available in links or as bulk sausage.