Home cooks that constantly pursue new skills deserve a lot of praise. There are a lot going against the amateurs. Buying ingredient in small quantity cost a fortune and most of the time you get sub par quality ingredients. Stuck with toy-like equipment handicaps you. Making small batches is very labor intensive and exhausting. A lot of popular and wildly successful restaurants and chefs gained their fame from a very small repertoire. Many foodie home cooks are extremely resourceful and can cook with great depth and breadth.
I have been wanting to attempt sausage making for a long time. Only recently I got of the fence and
plunged in with both feet. This is the following post in which I used up 15 lbs of pork.
here is 5 lbs of andouille sausages before smoking
smoking with a toy smoker is quite challenging, especially one that burns charcoal; it is extremely difficult to control the temperature; nonetheless here is the result
closeup of the cross-section
I had about 5 lb of pork butt left and I decided to make another batch of Weisswurst. I would like to have some pig skins as the ingredients but I didn't want to drive to a store looking for it. Weisswurst requires finely ground meat and I thought I would grind the pork twice in my grinding attachment. Big mistake. I would learnt that you don't want to feed a meat grinder the second time as the ground meat will just clog up the worm gear which pushes the meat towards to the cutter and die. In retrospect I should have chosen the fine die plate. I didn't for the fear it would be too hard for my Kenmore (the British Kenmore) mixer.
ground pork with spices and seasoning (i know, proper weisswurst should have veal but who can afford real veal this days not to mention very few places sell the real thing)
Weisswurst making requires emulsifying the ground meat mixture. I have to decide to do this with my Kenmore mixer or my food processor. I dislike food processor for the same reasons of a blade type coffee grinder. I decided to use a cake mixing paddle with my Kenmore. In all fairness the Kenmore mixer is not exactly a cheap consumer grade household mixer. 5 pounds of ground pork in the mixing bowl turned out to be quite taxing for the mixer as the meat paste would rise above the rim of the bowl and threaten to make a mess on the grinder. The mixer would be more comfortable with dealing with 4 lbs at a time.
I didn't take any photos of the emulsified meat paste as I had a handful not to smear meat paste all over my iPhone.
here is 5 lbs of weisswurst - it is not exactly weiss (white) because i didn't want to kill my mixer to achieve a truly emulsified state; also i used home ground black mustard seeds which left the dark specks
breakfast with home made sweet mustard as condiment
yum!
a meal made with andouille sausage and a small lobster
rachel (no, not our wildly successful american imposter tv celebrity "chef" similarly named rachael) happened to be making a lobster dish too
rachel can cook circles around rachael - you are blind, or live on junk food, or have no taste buds if you think otherwise :-)
what to do with the meat left in the bottom of the sausage stuffer - make a breakfast with it
then flush it down with a bowl of leek soup - i use most of the green part that most folks would throw away, hence the much greener hue
my technique is to separate the green part and add them first into the stock - i also slice the green parts finer; sometimes i would use a handheld food blender to pulverize the stock with the cooked green parts; to me he leek soup taste richer with the green part not to mention is healthier; i now prefer little or no butter or cream for a purer taste of the leek
as a bonus feature of this post, here are some photos inside the german delicatessen
edelweiss that inspired me to make my own sausage and cured meat
head cheese with tongue
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