Food Lab 32: Chorizo

No, I did not get the numbers out of order. As I'd mentioned in my last Food Lab post, we had made something that required aging. Well, the wait is over. We successfully dry aged sausage and didn't kill anyone!

Some of our out of town friends were visiting and wanted to see how sausage is made. Having successfully made sausage a few times, we decided to up the ante, with fresh Mexican chorizo and dried Spanish chorizo.

For the Mexican chorizo, we started with the recipe at honestcooking.com. What did we lab? The vinegar: cider versus white wine versus red wine versus sherry. Of course, Mexican chorizo is also intended to be fresh sausage style, so we didn't stuff it in casings. When we fried up the patties, we discovered that structural integrity was an issue (the pork shoulder we got from the McLean Organic Butcher may have been higher fat than the recipe stipulated).

You might think that the sherry would be the winner, and that's actually what The Executive Committee preferred, although the rest of us preferred red wine vinegar. We also pretty quickly realized that we needed to up the red pepper flakes. And we'd forgotten the garlic in the test batch. Oops! We corrected that in the full batches, which we made with red wine vinegar and a Tbsp of crushed red pepper flakes for each pound of meat.

But that wasn't the real test - the real test was making Spanish style chorizo. We started with the same base recipe, but divided the paprika between sweet and smoked, added cayenne, used sherry vinegar, and DOUBLED the salt.

And then we stuffed them.

And then Mad Kitchen Scientist and The Executive Committee hung them to cure in their basement for about two months. Yes, really. Raw meat.

When they were finally ready, we decided that we'd have to try eating them together. If we were going to go down to food poisoning and/or botulism, we were going as a group. So we gathered this weekend for an evening of eating raw meat we'd dry cured ourselves, making paella, and planning our upcoming foodie trip to Italy this fall (more about that in a future post).

The first thing we did was slice up one of the sausages and eat it. And we all survived! And it was DELICIOUS.

When none of us had dropped over dead immediately, we celebrated with white peach sangria, paella, and flan.

The sangria was very loosely based on this recipe, although I reduced the pineapple juice by about half, and the simple syrup by about 3/4. I was using berries and mango as the additional fruit, rather than apples and pears, and I thought it would be too sweet otherwise. And instead of goosing it with brandy, I used anjeo tequila. When I served it, I topped it with a little champagne, since I think white sangria benefits from bubbles.

The paella was loosely based on this recipe. We substituted chicken for the rabbit, mostly because we had a chicken and were too lazy to go over to Eastern Market for a rabbit. We didn't like the idea of using green beans, so we used some gorgeous red and green poblano peppers I had from the CSA, and we used far more than a "pinch" of saffron. It was also delicious, but it makes A LOT. We were each left with two quarter containers of paella leftovers. I know what I'll be having for lunch this week. The method is very similar to making risotto, which is logical when you think about it: force a lot of yummy liquid into a short grain rice, add tasty goodness in the form of meat and/or veg, and eat.

In keeping with the Spanish theme, we decided we needed to make some flan, too, based on this extremely simple recipe. Interestingly, they have you caramelize the sugar without any water. You have to go slow and keep an eye on it, but it got to a lovely dark brown color without any danger of burning, so I have to say that I recommend it. It didn't call for any salt, which I thought was bogus, so I added about a teaspoon. We baked in individual flan cups rather than one big pan, so we did the water bath method even though the recipe doesn't call for it, and cut the cook time back to about 40 minutes. It was probably about 5 minutes too long, or perhaps the specified temperature is a bit too high (Mad Kitchen Scientist said he's usually done flan at 300 rather than 350), so it was a little more firm that ideal, but still quite tasty.

I don't know that I would necessarily recommend attempting to dry age your own sausage to everyone. There is a very real risk of serious illness. If you're going to do it, make sure to use top quality meat, don't be shy with the spices or salt, and watch the sausages carefully as they dry. If anything feels, looks, or smells off, don't hesitate to dump them. That said, life is risk and this one was deliciously worth it.

Food Lab 20: Butchering, Part 2

The thing about getting a whole lamb (or two) is that you get the WHOLE lamb (or two).  So after you've separated your shoulder meat, and cut your chops, and prepared your tenderloin, and gotten all fancy with your lambchetta, and boned out your legs, you're left with scraps. Lots of scraps. About 10 pounds all together from the two original lambs. Plus organs.

Being thrifty, nose-to-tail types like we are, we weren't just going to throw that out.

No way.

So Chef Spouse, Mad Kitchen Scientist, the Executive Committee, and I gathered to make merguez, make a second batch of stock, and have some fun with cooking offal.

If you recall, we had made sausage before, and it turns out, we did learn some things! We used the merguez recipe straight from Whole Beast Butchery, with one small change. WBB calls for a whole bunch of yummy spices, and some "wet works" (jalapeno, garlic, red onion, etc.), but it does not call for any additional fat. Who in the what where? That seemed unacceptable to us, so we added about 1/2 pound of lamb fat for every 3 pounds, totaling at just about 2 pounds of lamb fat all together. Hey, we'd rendered all that beautiful lamb fat; we had to use it for something.

OK, so what is it that we'd learned from last time?

First, DO NOT attempt to stuff 20 pounds of sausage in one afternoon.

Two, soak the casings for a while before you use them to cut down on the nasty smell (MAJOR improvement).

Three. you need the BIG tray for your Kitchen Aid sausage stuffing attachment,

Four, Mad Kitchen Scientist had improved his casing handling technique, and Chef Spouse had improved his forcing the meat through technique.

And we were only stuffing about 4 pounds of sausage - we packed up the rest loose. One thing that was kind of cool is that the added fat, which stayed fairly intact in the pieces I'd originally shaved/hacked it into in the loose sausage, basically emulsified into the meat in the process of putting it through the mechanical sausage stuffer. Can't wait to see how it cooks up!

At the same time, we had two lamb hearts (above) and four lamb kidneys (below) to deal with.

The hearts we simply stuffed with (hearts have chambers) and wrapped in bacon and roasted. Verdict? As The Executive Committee observed, fat brings flavor, and the heart is a VERY lean muscle. The bacon added some flavor and salt, and the texture was very like liver, but not quite as rich. Mad Kitchen Scientist and I liked it. Chef Spouse and The Executive Committee were more "meh." We all agreed it might benefit from some sort of marinade.

The kidneys were BEAUTIFUL. And we didn't have a lot of fancy ingredients. So we just used Julia's base recipe from Mastering (this one is very like it). You carefully remove all the fat and silver skin from the kidneys, saute them briefly (only about 4 minutes) in hot fat (we labbed butter versus lamb fat), remove them and deglaze the pan with shallots, white wine and lemon juice...and then the magic happens. You remove the pan from the heat, take your pre-mashed butter/Dijon mustard mix (did I forget to mention that?) and melt it into the pan juices, slice the kidneys VERY thin, then return them to the pan and reheat the whole thing on low briefly. Sprinkle with parsley.

Again, Mad Kitchen Scientist and I thought they were great. Chef Spouse and The Executive Committee were less enthusiastic.

So now I've butchered a whole animal, gone a second round on sausage, and tasted two new types of offal.

Next up? Something in honor of an upcoming holiday (no fair guessing!), and the return of my (now former) colleague and his spouse.

Food Lab 10: Sausage

Told you we weren't out of business.

In what has become a continuing theme for us, we went for excess: 9 1/2 pounds of pork shoulder, 2 1/2 pounds of uncured pork belly. For those who are bad at math, that's TWELVE pounds of meat to grind, season, and stuff into casings.

One thing we realized immediately: sausage making brings out your inner 12 year old. Yes, it's all kind of gross and lends itself to lots of adolescent jokes about sex. I even pulled out "that's what she said" at one point, and I NEVER make "that's what she said" jokes. NEVER.

Another thing we realized nearly immediately: as Mad Kitchen Scientist observed, "This is a process that lends itself to industrialization." The grinding, mixing and spicing was FAST. The stuffing was S-L-O-W. No wonder sausages are made in factories.

 We chose 3 basic sausage recipes:

1. The herbed breakfast sausage from Lets Make Sausage.
2. Chef Donald Link's spicy sausage recipe from Real Cajun.
3. The andouille recipe from The Spicy Sausage.

A few notes on making sausage: one, the recipes all make HUGE batches. We cut everything at least in half. Two, we thought none of them seemed seasoned enough, so after cutting the meat in half or more, we kept all the other spicing as the original full recipe called for, other than the salt - we reduced the salt accordingly.

For grinding, we did a rough chop on everything (like 2 inches x 2 inches), then fed it through the KitchenAid meat grinder.

The mixing of ingredients happened fast. All the sausage recipes recommend mixing with your hands, and they're right - you need to feel the distribution of your herbs and spices throughout the meat. We followed the first two recipes pretty closely, although, as often happens with Food Lab, things started to spin out of control by the third sausage, so we got a little creative with the andouille recipe. Fresh hot peppers and cloves both made an unexpected appearance. The spinning out of control may have been related to the excellent home brew Mad Kitchen Scientist supplied - a porter, a steam ale, and an accidental summer lager that was FANTASTIC.

Julia and McGee both recommend a 2 to 1 ratio of meat to fat. Most of the recipes we found online called for no additional fat. That just seemed wrong to us, so we sought a middle way, spreading the 2 1/2 pounds of pork belly across the 9 1/2 pounds of shoulder.

Anywho, the thing that really takes the time is the stuffing. The guy who runs Let's Make Sausage seems to have some sort of press that apparently makes the stuffing process go quickly. The KitchenAid stuffing attachment works fine, but it takes FOREVER. It takes to long that Chef Spouse uttered the unthinkable: if we start making a lot of homemade sausage, we're getting that uni-tasker sausage press. What would Alton Brown say?!?!?

Even though we had snacks, we wanted to try the sausage, so we did do a little cooking and tasting of patty sausage. We quickly learned that the patty sausage is not nearly as good as the sausage in casings. My theory is that sausage in casings basically cooks by poaching in its own fat, while the fat in patty sausage cooks out. I could be wrong. But I don't think so.

Another thing we learned? The casings smell BAD. It was the pig's GI tract. It smells like it was the pig's GI tract.

I thought the best sausage was Donald Link's spicy sausage. Chef Spouse and The Executive Committee preferred the herbed sausage. Mad Kitchen Scientist was reserving judgement until he had the chance to smoke some of the andouille.

So how much did it make? FIFTY 6-8 inch sausages. The IAs couldn't make it - the Spawn was having a bad day - and I've already promised them some of the haul. Yes, it made THAT MUCH sausage.

[Insert naughty sausage joke here.]