I think I mentioned Paul Bertolli’s
Cooking by Hand before, but it’s worth mentioning again. Reading it makes you want to run off to a Tuscan villa and eat handmade pastas from homegrown wheat all day long. Lately I’ve been obsessing over the salume chapter. How great would it be to make your own prosciutto? Pretty awesome until you read how you have to hang your salted and massaged pork leg in a 40° humidity-controlled room for six months after which you need to clean it and coat it in kidney fat (available at most 7-Elevens) and Italian rice flour and let it hang in a 50° cellar for another six months before it’s ready to eat. Sadly, my temperature and humidity-controlled rooms are in somebody else’s house right now. So I decided to start out on a culinary bunny slope by making fresh sausage. It’s pretty straightforward and requires relatively simple climate control.
Thank you, Mr. Pig
The first step was buying an 8-pound pork shoulder. Most recipes call for extra back fat but this shoulder had a fair amount of fat through it and it’s not the easiest ingredient to find. Food nerds like
McGee say that the back fat has a better texture and melting point but the idea of trimming shoulder fat out and replacing it with back fat seemed wasteful and, more importantly, labor intensive.
Of course you need a meat grinder, too, like the
attachment for a trusty KitchenAid. But I also needed the
sausage stuffing attachment which I picked up at nearby Sur La Table. The store was right next to a bookstore so I poked my head in and perused through Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn’s
Charcuterie.
Taken with a spy camera in Barnes & Noble
His recipe for hot Italian sausage seemed oddly spiced – i.e., no sage – but who was I to question such a fancy looking cookbook? Back home, I was still dubious.
Spice overkill?
I decided to mix my spices using the dry weights provided in the recipe, thinking that would be more accurate. But when I mixed my spices with the meat before grinding, it seemed very well…spiced. Again, who was I to question a book endorsed by the great Thomas Keller?
Play-Doh for grown ups
The grinding was lots of fun. There’s something incredibly satisfying about sending chunks of meat through whirring steels blades. Very
Fargo-esque. I probably made a mistake to make sausage on a 100 degree day as you’re supposed to keep everything cold, but it went by pretty quickly.
After that it was into the paddle mixer where you mix the meat until it’s cohesive and sticky. Then it was time for a taste.
You’re supposed to check at this point to adjust for seasoning but the sausage was spiced and salty I almost went out to buy another hunk of pork to dilute it. I even used less seasoning than the recipe called for. But checking the recipe again, I noticed that their volume-to-mass conversions seemed off. The 8 grams of coriander they called for seemed to be substantially more than the one tablespoon equivalent in the recipe. Turns out, a tablespoon of coriander barely weighs 3 grams. All of weights were heavily overstated. How the hell did that happen? I can’t take out the salt they told me to put in. Who's to blame? Who can I sue?
But I soldiered on and got my sausage rig on the mixer and started stuffing away. Here I hit another snag: the KitchenAid attachment sucks ass. The idea is to cram a steady stream of meat into the machine so you can have nice, even sausages but what actually happens is that occasional bits go through the mixer and the rest comes oozing back around the edges of the crammer. At the same time, the sausage casing fills up with air bubbles.
More comes out the top than into the casing
The other big flaw with the sausage stuffer is that the sausage comes out a foot off the counter which means you constantly have to hold all the sausage as it comes out. You can’t just let it dangle.
Vacuum sealed by my lips
But after much sweating and hassle, I managed to cram all 8 pounds into pig intestines, packed them in Ziploc bags and got them in the freezer. In the end, they turned out O.K. I still think they’re on the salty side and the coriander is very prominent but everyone seems to like them. They’re juicy, too, so I don’t think I lost anything from omitting the back fat. Maybe it’s not the 30% fat that most recipes call for, but I’ll say it’s in the high-20s.
Sliced when frozen makes it perfect for pizza
So what are the lessons I learned? Trust Bartoli over Ruhlman. Don’t feel bound by the recipe. I think any kind of seasoned fatty pork will taste pretty good as long as one doesn’t overdo it. Most importantly, I imagine it’s much easier as a two-person operation; one to stuff the meat hopper, the other to handle the sausage. It’s really, really frustrating to do it on your own. And if you can afford it, get a real sausage maker. Screw you, KitchenAid.
On my Christmas list
