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Swing low in a dark glass hour
At Christmas, someone gave ChrisC a Green & Black's cookery book. While he waded through recipes for cakes and mousses, I peered over his shoulder and got excited about the Chilean Pork and Chocolate sausages.
We waste no time round our way, so barely four months later we checked whether our excellent local butcher would sell us sausage skins. He would!
So, here are the raw ingredients:
This is what we started with..
I think it's probably all reasonably self-evident. Pork - some diced, some minced - onions, garlic, a chopped green chilli. Oh, and some ginger, but that's barely made it into the photo. The red bowl has chopped sage, thyme, coriander and flat-leaf parsley in it.
Oh, and chocolate. Dark chocolate. It's not actually Green & Black's, but don't tell them.
Plus, of course, some spices. I'm a total sucker for spices in little piles.
Or big piles. I'd have had a whale of a time in the spice markets of Marrakech when I went on holiday last year had it not been for the constant barrage of ultra-hard-sell that made even glancing at something a mistake. But I digress.
That's cumin, mace, paprika and nutmeg.
Sausage skin needs to be soaked before using, to remove the salt, and is frankly extremely unphotogenic.
I presume the skin is pig-derived, I didn't actually ask when buying it.
Anyway! Some frying and melting later, everything got mixed up in one bowl. You'd be surprised at the amount of cognitive dissonance generated by pouring melted dark chocolate into a bowlful of fried onions and pork.
Now, my meat grinder - which regular readers will know I use for virtually anything except grinding meat - was already rather surprised to be pressed into service turning belly pork into pork mince. It looked quite aghast when I dug out its custom sausage-filling nozzle and threaded sausage skin onto it.
Sausage-making is not a pretty process. I'll let you write your own jokes.
However, it did start to look pretty plausible. Pushing the mixture through the machine was surprisingly hard work (it was very stiff mixture, having been in the fridge all night as per the recipe). And if allowed to extrude at its natural rate, the sausage came out quite skinny. So it turned into a two-man job, with one of us ramming the sausage mixture through the machine and one of us trying to regulate the flow to produce nice fat sausages.
We were surprisingly restrained in the sausage-based innuendo department, actually.
Once extruded, it didn't look too bad...
And once linked, it looked surprisingly plausible...
If you look closely at that picture, you can see that there are some air-pockets in the skins, which I think you probably shouldn't get in top-notch sausage.
Then it was into a pan of boiling, salted water to blanch the sausages for a minute. The recipe didn't actually give a why on this. I wish recipes in general were more explanatory. Once blanched, the sausages changed colour alarmingly.
Anyway, they went into the grill. The recipe book wanted me to serve them with steamed brown rice and two-bean salsa including peppers, tomatoes, onions and avocado.
Wot? No mash and onion gravy?
I figured I'd followed instructions so far, so went for it (deviating only slightly to make some (rather inferior) red wine jus).
And how were they? Err, actually, if I'm honest, they were OK. All right. They didn't taste of chocolate. Or chilli. Or... well, anything much. They were nice, but the overall flavour was rather... brown. And despite the fat on the belly pork they were a little dry.
Still, they were a first attempt :) I'm not sure I'd bother with that recipe again, but I like the concept of making sausages. Besides, spending half a weekend faffing about in the kitchen is my idea of fun.
Of course, the biggest problem in our household when undertaking this kind of project is solving the question: what music do you listen to when making sausages? After the Adam Green song which mentioned "sausages and eggs, and hot and sour soup" we kind of ran out of ideas. Later on, we clutched at straws with the "hot dog, jumping frog" of Prefab Sprout. Better suggestions welcome :)
We waste no time round our way, so barely four months later we checked whether our excellent local butcher would sell us sausage skins. He would!
So, here are the raw ingredients:
This is what we started with..
I think it's probably all reasonably self-evident. Pork - some diced, some minced - onions, garlic, a chopped green chilli. Oh, and some ginger, but that's barely made it into the photo. The red bowl has chopped sage, thyme, coriander and flat-leaf parsley in it.
Oh, and chocolate. Dark chocolate. It's not actually Green & Black's, but don't tell them.
Plus, of course, some spices. I'm a total sucker for spices in little piles.
Or big piles. I'd have had a whale of a time in the spice markets of Marrakech when I went on holiday last year had it not been for the constant barrage of ultra-hard-sell that made even glancing at something a mistake. But I digress.
That's cumin, mace, paprika and nutmeg.
Sausage skin needs to be soaked before using, to remove the salt, and is frankly extremely unphotogenic.
I presume the skin is pig-derived, I didn't actually ask when buying it.
Anyway! Some frying and melting later, everything got mixed up in one bowl. You'd be surprised at the amount of cognitive dissonance generated by pouring melted dark chocolate into a bowlful of fried onions and pork.
Now, my meat grinder - which regular readers will know I use for virtually anything except grinding meat - was already rather surprised to be pressed into service turning belly pork into pork mince. It looked quite aghast when I dug out its custom sausage-filling nozzle and threaded sausage skin onto it.
Sausage-making is not a pretty process. I'll let you write your own jokes.
However, it did start to look pretty plausible. Pushing the mixture through the machine was surprisingly hard work (it was very stiff mixture, having been in the fridge all night as per the recipe). And if allowed to extrude at its natural rate, the sausage came out quite skinny. So it turned into a two-man job, with one of us ramming the sausage mixture through the machine and one of us trying to regulate the flow to produce nice fat sausages.
We were surprisingly restrained in the sausage-based innuendo department, actually.
Once extruded, it didn't look too bad...
And once linked, it looked surprisingly plausible...
If you look closely at that picture, you can see that there are some air-pockets in the skins, which I think you probably shouldn't get in top-notch sausage.
Then it was into a pan of boiling, salted water to blanch the sausages for a minute. The recipe didn't actually give a why on this. I wish recipes in general were more explanatory. Once blanched, the sausages changed colour alarmingly.
Anyway, they went into the grill. The recipe book wanted me to serve them with steamed brown rice and two-bean salsa including peppers, tomatoes, onions and avocado.
Wot? No mash and onion gravy?
I figured I'd followed instructions so far, so went for it (deviating only slightly to make some (rather inferior) red wine jus).
And how were they? Err, actually, if I'm honest, they were OK. All right. They didn't taste of chocolate. Or chilli. Or... well, anything much. They were nice, but the overall flavour was rather... brown. And despite the fat on the belly pork they were a little dry.
Still, they were a first attempt :) I'm not sure I'd bother with that recipe again, but I like the concept of making sausages. Besides, spending half a weekend faffing about in the kitchen is my idea of fun.
Of course, the biggest problem in our household when undertaking this kind of project is solving the question: what music do you listen to when making sausages? After the Adam Green song which mentioned "sausages and eggs, and hot and sour soup" we kind of ran out of ideas. Later on, we clutched at straws with the "hot dog, jumping frog" of Prefab Sprout. Better suggestions welcome :)
no subject
I too am surprised by how many sausage-related songs I could think of off the top of my head. But I do really, really like sausages.
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I don't feel bad for not thinking of those, as I don't actually know any of them... to YouTube!
You turn and cower, shadows move in pairs
But Stiltskin, Inside, for a kudo please! :-)
(Oh, the Tom Waits song is Eggs and Sausage, apparently!)
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SausageskinStiltskin. I don't really know my Tom Waits, either. I'm going to end up with a regular sausage playlist at this rate!no subject
Hot Dog, They Might Be Giants
Postcard, The Who ("there's miles of frankfurters and people")
Kitchen Man, Bessie Smith (lots of innuendo!)
Bank Holiday, Blur ("barbecue is cooking/sausages and chicken")
Master of the House, any Les Mis soundtrack ("filling up the sausages with this and that")
Kielbasa, Tenacious D
I keep wanting to add Punky's Dilemma by Simon and Garfunkel, since it has lots of lines relating to breakfast, but it doesn't actually mention sausages. It's stuck as an earworm, though!
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looksquint hard enough.no subject
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It's canonically a length of (scraped) pig small intestine, I think.