R E C I P E S
Saucisses de Toulouse (Fresh Sausages)
When you make your own fresh sausage, you control the quality of the meat, the grind, the proportion of fat and all the rest, so you end up with a quality and, if you like, with kinds that you don’t normally find in a store. Some of the most delicious sausages are straightforward and simple, with few added flavors, such as these saucisses de Toulouse and saucisses au vin blanc for raw oysters. This recipe for Toulouse is also the basic one for sausage meat, chair à saucisses, traditionally used by French housewives to stuff tomatoes or peppers or poultry, and with various additions it can serve as a model for other fresh sausages, including lamb or beef merguez.
The flavorful cut used for making sausage as a rule is the shoulder, which happens to be relatively inexpensive. The lower part is called the picnic in the United States, and the upper part is the butt or Boston butt and often sold boneless. For the necessary additional fat, fresh fatback is good but hard to find. Easiest is to call ahead and ask a good butcher to set aside the outer fat trimmed from pork loins and chops. Don’t worry too much when it comes to the proportion of fat to lean. For larger quantities, the amounts of all the ingredients can be multiplied.
If you grind the meat yourself, be sure your device pushes it efficiently past a sharp, clean-cutting blade. If the cutting is poor and the meat takes too long to get through, then the fat warms and softens and the sinews separate from the lean in long, tough strings, ruining the texture of the cooked sausage. For small quantities, an alternative to a grinder is rhythmic chopping with a matched pair of 10- or 12-inch (25- or 30-cm) chef’s knives — not modern light ones but old-fashioned Sabatiers. This doesn’t require a heroic effort, doesn’t warm the meat, and goes surprisingly quickly, and afterward the cleanup is much easier, aside from flung bits of meat. Chilling is key. When the fat remains hard and intact during grinding and stuffing, lean will adhere to lean and the texture of the cooked sausage will be more homogeneous. If the materials warm, the fat will smear and coat the tiny pieces of lean, which, after cooking, leaves you with dry ball bearings of meat in grease. Before you grind and again before you stuff, the meat must be deeply chilled — just above freezing is ideal.
If you own a good sausage stuffer and are familiar with its use, put the mixture into natural hog casings, which are traditional for most fresh sausages. The size, roughly 1½ inches (4 cm) in diameter, allows the meat to cook through without drying out. (Rinse the insides by slipping one end of the length of casing over the kitchen tap and letting the water run through it.) If you don’t have a stuffer, however, don’t run out and buy one, not only because of the expense, but also because some machines are immensely frustrating to use. They churn the mixture, warming the fat and ruining the texture; especially guilty are meat grinders with an interior screw and stuffing horn attachment and certain plunger-type stuffers. Instead of wrestling with one of those, make crépinettes. Wrap patties of the mixture in caul fat, called crépine in French. It’s worth seeking that out rather than cooking bare patties, because the caul, like casings, both protects the surface and adds a hint of the earthy aroma of an andouillette. Like a stuffed sausage, crépinettes can be either grilled or sautéed.
If you sauté, once the sausages or crépinettes are out of the pan, you can pour off all but a thin layer of fat, add a good amount of chopped shallots, and cook them gently. You can then deglaze with white or red wine, assuming the pan is nonreactive — otherwise, deglaze with water — and pour the flavorful liquid over the sausages (you can skip the shallots if you don’t have them). Besides the array of possible starch accompaniments (potatoes, polenta, lentils, various dried beans) and salad (not least the creamy heart of frisée chicory), a good and sometimes overlooked accompaniment is cooked greens. Because of the fat, sausage goes easily with many wines, white and red. And because of the fat and salt, the wine’s primary job is to be refreshing, thus somewhat low in alcohol.
2 pounds (1 kg) boneless pork shoulder, about 80 percent lean and 20 percent fat, which means some additional fat, such as outer trimmings saved by a butcher
2 ¼ teaspoons (16 gr) salt
½ teaspoon (1.5 gr) finely ground black pepper
a few gratings (0.5 gr) nutmeg
½ clove (2 or 3 gr) garlic, very finely chopped, optional
at least 5 feet (1.5 meters) of hog casings, well rinsed outside and in, or several pieces of caul fat
If a butcher grinds the meat, make certain that it remains coarse — that it is passed through coarse holes, ¼ to 5⁄16 inch (about 7 mm) in diameter, only once. If you grind the meat yourself, trim any tough silverskin and connections, cut both lean and fat into rough 1-inch (2-cm) cubes, and mix them together. Spread them on a metal sheet or pan and chill them, uncovered, in the coldest part of the refrigerator for an hour and then put them in the freezer for a final 5 minutes. Pass the deeply chilled meat through the grinder once, using a grinding plate with ¼- to 5⁄16-inch (about 7 mm) holes. Spread the ground meat on a metal baking sheet or roasting pan and place it, uncovered, in the coldest part of the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes, followed by 5 minutes in the freezer.
Mix together the salt, pepper, and nutmeg, making sure there are no clumps, and, using your hands, combine these thoroughly with the deeply chilled meat. Sprinkle on the garlic and mix again. Continue to knead the meat for a few minutes until it gains body and becomes sticky. (If you are working a day ahead, refrigerate the meat overnight at this point.) If the mixture is still quite cold, go on to the next step. Otherwise, again spread the ground meat on the sheet or pan and chill it for another 30 minutes, followed by 5 minutes in the freezer.
If you are equipped and have experience, stuff the mixture into casings. Otherwise, make crépinettes. Rinse the caul fat well in room-temperature water, and then let it soak for about 10 minutes. In the meantime, divide the sausage mixture into 8 mounds; roll them into balls. Gently squeeze the excess soaking water from the caul fat and spread the pieces out on a work surface. Place the balls of sausage at intervals, so there is enough caul around each one to wrap it up. Use scissors to cut the caul, and pull it up around the ball so the edges overlap and form a sack (it’s fine to patch). Gently flatten each crépinette, and turn it over so the seams are on the bottom.
The sausage meat, whether unstuffed, stuffed, or in crépinettes, will keep in the refrigerator for several days. If you’ve stuffed it into casings a day ahead, leave the sausages uncovered overnight in the refrigerator so the surface dries, which helps with both keeping and browning.
If you’ve twisted the sausages into links, cut them apart before cooking. Prick each sausage in 2 or 3 places so it won’t burst open in cooking. Now and then, even pricked, a sausage, cooked too fast with too much heat, will burst. If just-stuffed sausages wait overnight, they have less tendency to explode, and their flavor deepens. (Probably they explode more if cooked immediately because the stuffing is then very firmly packed — nobody likes a limp sausage. Later the casing gradually stretches and the contents set.) Grill them over hot coals, place them under a broiler, or sauté them. If you sauté, you can reduce the chance of overcooking by finishing the sausages in a slow oven. They’re done when they have shrunk at least slightly and, when pricked to the center with a knife or skewer, the juices run clear at a point, after anywhere from 12 to 25 minutes, depending on the heat you use. Serves 4.
From The Art of Eating Cookbook
