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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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:

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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.