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.

Stéphane Reynaud is currently a successful cookbook writer and runs a popular restaurant outside of Paris, but he explains that growing up “in the Ardèche plateau in southern France, where my grandpa was a butcher, and the back of his shop was my playroom, I grew up surrounded by food. Simple, rustic terrines were the staple of our family mealtimes.” This country-style, pork liver terrine comes from his excellent little book, Terrine, and one taste makes you feel like you have stumbled upon a remote French village and been taken in to someone’s home where they barely speak English (Reynaud’s recipes could definitely benefit from a little more translating!), and where the food may be simple but is also simply the best that the area produces.  Food like this could persuade you to forget all about your plans for traveling and sightseeing and make you decide instead to dig in to that small village and sample all it has to offer.

If the Parisian liver terrine is all urbane and sophisticated, delicately scented with powdered cèpes (porcinis) and truffle oil, this is its rustic, country cousin.  Instead of being puréed, it is more coarse-textured and robustly flavored, with rum, lots of carmelized onions, and fresh herbs.  Instead of being coated with a concentrated pork jus, it is wrapped in a thick layer of homemade bacon.  It may be rustic, but it is by no means second-rate or second-class.  It is brimming with freshness and vitality and is perfect for family mealtimes like the ones Stéphane recollects.

Speaking of which, there was supposed to be more of this terrine left, to offer through the Club, but I fed it to my family for dinner, combined with a simple green salad from our own garden and some toasted hazelnuts from a friend’s orchard in Oregon.  Between the four of us, we managed to eat half of it!

I can’t remember now what steered me toward it, but I recently acquired a copy of Charcuterie Specialties, by Jean-Claude Frentz and Michel Poulain, and this recipe comes from their book. I had to try it, because it sounded crazy. This recipe completely turns what I thought I knew about making a pâté on its head.

Pâtés can be “country-style” or coarse-textured, but this one is a smooth-textured, emulsion-type. As Elton David Aberle et al. explain in The Principles of Meat Science, “An emulsion is defined as a mixture of two immiscible liquids, one of which is dispersed in the form of small droplets or globules in the other liquid. [Think of the oil and vinegar in salad dressing.] . . . In sausage emulsions, soluble proteins dissolved in the aqueous phase act as emulsifying agents coating all surfaces of the dispersed fat particles” (128-130). The point of a meat emulsion is to break the fat up into minute particles, because they separate the meat fibers from each other and lubricate the tissue, with the result that the texture seems delicate, light, and creamy. [Think of the tenderness of a well-marbled steak.] Finely-dispersed fat particles also do a better job of slowing down the progress of flavor-bearing molecules over our tongue and thus of “bringing out” the flavor of the meat and other ingredients. In fact, studies have shown that if you remove every speck of fat from meat, tasters can no longer tell if they are eating chicken or pork or beef or lamb.

Now everything I had previously read told me that the secret to a stable emulsion and a good pâté is to keep the meat–and everything that comes in contact with the meat!–as cold as freakin’ possible. In the chapter on pâtés in Ruhlman and Polcyn’s Charcuterie book, they write,

In order to combine the meat and fat perfectly, they must be very cold. If they become warm, the fat can soften or melt, and ultimately you can wind up with a broken forcemeat, just as you can wind up with a broken hollandaise. Until your pâté goes in the oven, you must do all that you can to keep the meat cold. Don’t let your ingredients and tools get warm. You don’t have to be fanatical about it–moving your KitcheAid out on the back deck in February snow–but do be slightly paranoid about it. Chill your grinder attachment in the freezer for an hour or more before grinding. When not working with any of the ingredients, keep them refrigerated. Set the bowl that will catch the ground meat in a larger bowl of ice. . . . If, you need to stop after grinding for whatever reason, return the meat to the refrigerator or freezer until you’re ready to proceed.” (206)

And they are not alone in this fanaticism or paranoia. In Modern Garde Manger, Robert Garlough and Angus Campbell write, “both the meat and grinding heads must be well chilled to prevent fat separation” (532). The CIA’s Garde Manger book also says, “Temperature control is the key to achieving the best results” (301). And finally, in Fritz Sonnenshmidt’s Charcuterie he insists, “Keep ingredients cold. Keep equipment cold. This is important to the success of pâtés and terrines” (209).

In Frentz and Poulain’s recipe for this liver terrine, all this fanaticism for freezing temperatures, all this paranoia about cold-processing, is tossed out the window.

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