Cook Without a Book: Sausage is Tasty

I am pleased to welcome blogreaders to a new, semi-regular feature – “Cook Without a Book” – in which my dear friend, Jay Pfaffman, PhD will be sharing his adventures in cooking.

Jay is an AWESOME and creative cook, and I have been telling him for several years that he needed to start a cooking and food blog. He has resisted,  but I’ve finally talked him into guest blogging here at my blog. You can leave questions for Jay about his recipes and blog posts in the comments below, and he’ll respond regularly. We will also be adding some “Cook Without a Book” video blogging very soon.

So, without further ado, I give you Dr. Jay Pfaffman! – Katie

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This weekend I made sausage with some friends. At least 25 pounds. I got home with 13 pounds. I split it in half with friends, fed some to other friends on the way home and had what I think was 13 pounds when I weighed it.

This is the third time I’ve made sausage. It’s incredibly good. The first time we made it we assumed that it would be just OK, since we hadn’t done it before. We were wrong. It was out of this world. We couldn’t believe it. So tasty.

Now, I’m generally a low-tech-just-make-decent-food-that-you-can-enjoy kind of guy, but making sausage, though it seems fairly crazy, is not that hard, and pretty darn fun. And if you make sausage yourself, you know what’s in it. I didn’t include any snouts or toenails, so that makes me feel pretty good.

Basically, it works like this: you grind up some meat, usually pork, add spices and some liquid and mix it up. Oh, and you add fat. Yeah, you add about 1 part of fat to 3 or 4 parts meat (depending on how much fat is in the meat). That part, the fat part, can be a bit disturbing, but fat is tasty.

Here’s what you need to make sausage. First, you need this recipe book: Aidell’s Complete Sausage Book. When I lived in San Francisco, I used to buy their sausage at the farmer’s market. Now I can buy it at Big Box stores. It’s a great primer and has tons of sausage recipes and a whole other section of recipes that have sausage as an ingredient. It’s a fine book.

The “hard” part of making sausage is the equipment. You need something to grind meat with. I have a grinder attachment for my Kitchenaide mixer. It works very well. You cut the meat up small enough to fit down that tub and it comes out the other end ground up. You can probably get by without this by buying ground pork and chuck, or by cubing it and sticking it in the food processor in small batches.

If you want you sausage in casings, (and who doesn’t?) the other piece of equipment you need is a sausage stuffer. The one that fits on the end of the Kitchenaide grinder that I like so much is entirely unsatisfactory. Save your $15 and just make loose sausage or apply it to the $50-$75 that a sausage stuffer costs. I don’t have one yet, but that seems like the way to go.

If you go to the Big Box store and buy pork butt (aka shoulder) you get about 15 pounds of meat. You need about 5 pounds of fat back to go with that to make sausage. It’s really hard to find fat back. Fat back is fat, from, uh, the back of a pig. We found some other fat scraps at a Real Butcher in Small Town.

So what happens is that you mix up the meat, the fat, some spices and some kind of liquid (like beer, wine, vinegar or an egg) and you have sausage. If you can stuff it into the casings, it’s even better, because the casings hold in the fat while it cooks, and, fat is tasty.

The casings can be a bit tricky to find, but you can get them from a decent butcher or a big sporting good store (because they think you’ll be killing animals to make into sausage). They’re usually packed in salt. You soak them for an hour or so, hold them up to the faucet to run water through them, and then stick them onto the stuffer thing. They’re really cool, or a little disgusting because they are, after all, intestines from animals (different animals have different sizes of intestines). And they look a lot a lot like, well, those “natural” condoms. One of the fun things about making sausages with friends is that there are plenty of opportunities for off-color jokes.

I’ve talked to people who have made sausage using “kits,” that are just bunches of spices that someone else has measured and then charged you lots of extra money for taking decisions away from you. I’d say mix your own spices.

It’s lots more fun, and a bit more tasty, to get the sausage into casings and to grind the meat yourself, but I think you’ll be surprised just how good it is to buy 3 pounds of ground pork, a pound of hog jowl (or fat back if you can find it) that you chill in the freezer and then grind in a food processor, add spices, mix it up and eat it. You’ll be amazed.

If you don’t buy the Aidell’s book, don’t worry. Here’s an outline for a recipe.

3 pounds of ground pork (preferably butt).
1/2 pound of ground back fat, hog jowl or bacon
4 teaspoons of salt (maybe less if you used bacon)
4 tablespoons of flavorings like garlic, fennel seeds, red pepper flakes, paprika
1 tablespoon of spicy stuff like ground black pepper and cayenne
0-1 tablespoons of other spices like sage, oregano, basil
0-1 cup of cilantro
1/2 cup of liquid like vinegar, liquor, or beer

Remember, you’re making sausage. Don’t get hung up on ingredients.

If you don’t have a meat grinder, buy the meat ground and then cube the fat into 1″ cubes, put in freezer for 1-2 hours and then process in the food processor until it’s finely ground.

Mix the meat and fat. Mix in the spices and liquid. Cook a small test batch to check the seasonings.

If you are going to stuff into casings, do so. If not, make it into patties, or roll into a log, freeze for 1-2 hours, cut into slices, separate with wax paper and freeze. You’ll be glad you did.