The Artist Eats An intersection of art, food, and culture.

Giant in the Kitchen: Sausagefest!

There's something really invigorating about trying something new in the kitchen. It's so  easy to get stuck in the same old same old - and I really think that boring eating makes for a boring life. It's not that standard fare is bad, but if you make it the same way week in and week out, things are going to get a bit monotonous.

One way I've found to really mix up a standard dinner is to make from scratch what you would normally purchase premade. This can really apply to anything, and it doesn't have to be overly complicated, but if you make something from scratch, it'll taste better and you'll have a little more personal investment in the meal. I'm thinking of food along the lines of homemade pasta, bread, ice cream and cake, but especially sausage.

I know, I know, sausage doesn't really fit into that category, but what's more simple than grinding meat?

My buddy Jason and I have been talking about making sausage for a few weeks now, and finally got around to it on Friday. I've never made sausage before, but Jason is an old pro, so it went smoothly and ended up being a real learning experience for me. He has this awesome old French sausage recipe which we used as a starting point, but we ended up coming up with some great mixes of our own.

I'm really lucky to work at Fair Shares, because it gives me access to awesome local meats. We used one of Karlios Hinkebein's pork shoulders for the sausage. This is sustainably raised, happy meat - you'd be hard pressed to find a better quality product. The pork shoulder was 14.25 pounds and we got a little over 10 pounds of sausage out of it. We decided to make loose sausage, because most casing is too thick and plastic-like for our tastes, and it's really just easier not to mess with the casing.

I haven't done much research on meat grinders, but Jason has a KitchenAid stand mixer with a meat grinding attachment and it seemed to work quite well.

There are basically five steps to making good loose sausage:

1. Cut the meat from the bone

2. Slice the meat into strips which will fit into your grinder.

3. Grind the meat.

4. Mix in your spices.

5. Grind the mixture again for thorough distribution of the seasonings and a smoother final sausage.

The whole process is very simple. The double grinding makes for a very smooth and silky sausage (i.e. no big chunks of gristle to get stuck in your teeth).

We split the ground meat into 3rds and made different seasoning mixes for each. It turned out that we made a French style, a Spanish style, and an Italian style, but that wasn't premeditated. The following recipes are rough guidelines. We didn't measure the ingredients and neither should you.

One little tip to really get your seasoning just right: In step 5 of the grinding process, grind a little bit and fry it up on the stove. This allows you to taste the sausage and see what, if any, corrections are needed to really get the most flavor into your final product.

The French Recipe is a pistachio-garlic sausage which tastes fantastic. We upped the amounts here by 50% because we had around 3 pounds but the proportions stayed close to the same. We didn't have truffles, but I gave it a few glugs of truffle oil instead, and I think we use around 6 cloves of garlic rather than 1.5 teaspoons.

2 pounds ground pork shoulder, 20 to 25 percent fat
1/4 cup dry, fruity white wine
1 teaspoon finely chopped garlic
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon Salt
1/3 cup shelled, unsalted pistachios
1/4 cup coarsely chopped black truffle, optional

For the Spanish Recipe, I ground all of the seasonings together in the mortar and pestle. We went heavy on all of the spices here, especially the Paprika. The pork can handle it, why not have a spicy sausage?

Smoked Paprika (I picked this up at Penzeys Spices in Maplewood)

Garlic

Red Pepper Flakes

Salt and freshly ground Peppercorns

The Italian Recipe is straight forward rosemary-fennel sausage.

Fennel seeds, ground

Fresh Rosemary (Locally grown on my balcony)

Roasted Garlic, two heads

Lemon Zest

Salt and freshly ground Peppercorns

Methuselah Cheese (A hard local cheese which would be the result of a tryst between a farm house cheddar and parmesan)