sausages

This week two good friends of mine got married. The marriage was in the bride’s back yard. It was a lovely ceremony, and far less annoying and pretentious than the average ceremony. No one was overly stressed, everyone had a good time, and no one ran up massive credit card bills or bankrupted their parents. In that vein, the reception consisted of appetizers, cake, and champagne, and guests were encouraged to provide their own bagged lunch. In the vein of bagged lunch, and this scene from a night at the opera, I decided to make my friends my own sausage. This was a bad idea. I had never made sausage before. Nonetheless, and in character, I forged ahead despite incapability and time restraints. This is a list of things I did wrong. Now I will know better. But first, what I did.

I got a lean cut of meat. I left it in the fridge too long. then I trimmed the fat off. I also got a box of fresh sage. I cut the meat into cubes, and threw it into a bowl with some smoked tea. I put it in the fridge for an hour or two, and then threw the meat into the food processor with sage, garlic, parsley, nutmeg, chili powder, paprika, and a fair amount of black pepper and salt. I added back a little of the smoked tea liquid, then stuffed the ground meat into a pastry bag.

I had purchased natural pig casings from ShopRite, I was very pleased with these. I bunched an end around the pastry bag and squeezed the meat into the casing, and divided it into two sausages. One I decided to dry and one I decided to cook.

Everything I did was a horrific mistake.

Firstly, sausages need fat. the sausage was dry. I was trying to be healthy, but I’m told 20% fat is a minimum. I may play with this as I move on, but my next attempt will meet this minimum. Secondly, the food processor was just a bad move. The sinews didn’t get decomposed enough, and the meat in general was too coarsely ground. The casing was also salted, and I should have rinsed the crystals off. At least.

While I’m discussing my equipment, I need a grinder. The pastry bag worked, but since I’m dissatisfied with the food processor, and grinders come with casings attachments, so I should make that investment. I’ve been wanting a standing mixer for a while, and many come with grinding attachments. That would be an investment for after I get my own place.

The dried sausage was an epic disaster. I had read you could put meat on a fan and dehydrate it. The principal was sound but it took me a few days to achieve this. The fan needs to be all the way up from the start. Now I know, next time I’ll do that. On the other hand, next time I may just smoke it. Still noodling this one.

What I think I’m going to do for next time is do a lean beef/ fatty pork blend. I’m not 100% on the cuts yet. Boston butt is the perfect 80/ 20 proportion, but I like beef in my sausage. I may need a spreadsheet for this one. The fallback would be using fat back, cheese, or butter. I might even use bacon. Maybe.

Obviously I’ll rinse the casing next time. This will require me to premeasure it.

The spices were actually killer. I hope I can replicate that aspect. I was worried the full package of sage would be too much. I learned there is no such thing as too much sage.

As it happened, the bride let slip that she loved Taylor ham, which you people outside of new jersey are not familiar with. imagine a cross between Canadian bacon and bologna stuffed into a sock. After it became abundantly clear that I had completely and royally screwed up sausage making, I fell back on providing her with her long missed New Jersey treat. there were, thankfully, other gifts according to my means. so alls well that ends well.

I will be trying sausages again. I have like a hundred more sausages worth of casings, so I kind of have to.

gumbo

southern cooking as a whole has never really interested me. i will grant you that it is very tasty. i love grits and biscuits and all that other wonderful, fatty crap. but as i hope to live past 40 an examination of a lard based tradition never appealed to me. it never helped that i was raised in a kosher home. the entire tradition is delicious, but ive never had anything to grab onto. last night i watched a woman make a pot of grits that must have required four pounds of butter. she used a dozen other ingredients, and all she came out with was grits, tomato sauce, and shrimp.

Cajun cooking is a wholly separate school. i understand cajun cooking. it is above all else French, and i am French only slightly less than I am jewish. more importantly, i learned to cook from a french woman and her son. i am not classicly trained, but roues and sauces and thickening things makes sense to me. to some french cooking is a dark art. to me southern cooking is vulger.

what i made tonight would probably make my french ancestors shake their heads in shame, and in all likelihood any creole who ate my gumbo would call me several very unkind names. to them i say, you must crawl before you can walk, and i learned a lot.

a gumbo is any soup thickened with ochra, or any part of an ochra plant. this evening i happened to have some ochra, so i went to the store ont he way home and picked up some ingredients. we dont get crawfish around here, and lobster is expensive. i made due with shrimp. shirmp are no replacement for crawfish. crawfish are much sweeter, and convey more flavors. shrimp are saltier, especially if they are from the ocean. nonetheless, i never intended this to be a traditional gumbo. i will now give the recipie as i did it, and then comment on what went horribly wrong.

i also procured some scallops and there was a great deal on cherrystone clams, so i got a dozen. these i rinsed and steamed with water and vermouth, and reserved the liquid.

i also made saffron rice. i used this recipe:http://thaifood.about.com/od/quickeasythairecipes/r/thaisaffronrice.htm , but i halved it and left out the chili and the salt.

i began by browning a good spoon of minced garlic, a leek and a red onion. remember when making leeks you only use the white and light green part.

i then added a parsnip in good, bite sized chunks, and two handfulls of baby carrots, cut in two. i also crumbled two portobello mushrooms into bite sized chunks.

while this browned up i added cumin, ginger, and chilli, but not a ton of chili. at this point it started to burn, so i threw in about a half cup of the liquid from steaming the clams. i then cut up the ochra and threw it in. after leting it cook a bit, i added the shrimp and scallops. i also had some thin sliced pork, so i trimmed the fat and fed it to the dog, and then threw that in. at this point i noticed the clams had gotten dry, so i threw them all into the soup. i let it simmer for a few minutes, and served it over the rice.

woah did i make a lot of mistakes here. but it come out very tasty.

the first thing i learned was that leek, onion, parsnip, and carrots are like the best soup base ever. i forgot the celery but if you have that in there and some salt i dont think you will ever miss chicken soup. i was loath to add anything else. honestly i think the seafood distracted from the vegetables here. that being said, the veggies had the gumption to stand up to the seafood with power. they probably made this soup more than anything else.

the clams. id never worked with clams this big before. i made sure to get live ones and was pleasantly surprised by the usability rate, but i steamed them too early, or i left them in too long, im not sure which. by the time they got in the soup they were somewhat chewy. everyone assumes clams are supposed to be chewy because they are so often over cooked. i failed in this regard, but they were still tasty.

i should have added the okra before the clam liquid. my biggest fault as a chef is that i wing it. this is a major sin in the early stages of a soup, or in any stage of a stir fry. always have your ingredients ready to go beforehand. duh. i got caught up in peeling the parsnip and everything started to burn. at that point i had to add the liquid to keep things from getting bad. this rescued it, but the okra wasn't ideally prepared.

while we are on the subject of things burning, fuck that saffron rice recipe. seriously. it is plausible i am not making my rice "correctly." fuck that. it is rice. you put it in a pot with water and boil that shit. i tried to get all fancy and steam it like she said. nearly ruined the rice. if you don't have a steamer, just ignore the second half of that page. just put the rice in the stock and boil it, keep an eye on it, stir it, whatever. fuck that leaving it for ten minutes shit. if you are not using the rice as a base, i would recommend adding salt. mine was a bit bland, but the seafood in the gumbo made it not matter.

one of the first things my mother taught me, cooking wise, is that the only way to prepare mushrooms, the ONLY WAY, is to simmer it slowly in a little butter. I have ignored her advice over the past few years, but i realized today that the reason all my soups come out ugly and black, and the mushrooms are bland, is that I disregarded my mothers advice. i may not use butter, but from now on i will be cooking my mushrooms separately.

the stock for the soup was not particularly thick. the point of it being a gumbo is that the okra thickens it. at a basic level i failed myself, my family, and my ancestors. in future, i will simmer the okra and the vegetables longer before adding the seafood.

all in all, the gumbo was very tasty. i made some mistakes though, which i will learn from in the future.