My name is Allan, I am a very serious chef, and this post is about making Spam-style luncheon meat from scratch.
I didn’t grow up eating Spam, but I have friends for whom it is a powerful piece of childhood nostalgia.
Spam is a pork forcemeat that is packed and cooked in a can. The overall effect is rather like a terrine, especially reminiscent of the cured pork meatloaves of Europe, like leberkäse. There is some speculation about the origin of the moniker. Is it an elision of “spiced ham”? An abbreviation of “shoulder of pork and ham”? These are all apocryphal, and the producer of Spam, Hormel Foods, has … Continue reading.
This post is about making sausage rolls from scratch.
In theory any style of sausage meat can be used, but I think this English banger sausage mix is most like the rolls I ate growing up. It is made from pork, simple seasonings (pepper, mace, nutmeg), and a good quantity of rusk or toasted breadcrumb. The breadcrumb gives the sausage a distinct texture, slightly less springy than, say, fresh bratwurst or breakfast sausage.
As for the dough, most sources say to use puff pastry. I tend to disagree. High quality puff might be acceptable, but poor quality produces an airy, insipid texture. I prefer my standard pie dough with a touch of baking … Continue reading.
An emulsifed sausage (top) compared to a coarsely ground sausage (bottom).
This post is about making emulsified sausages like hot dogs, wieners, and mortadella at home, using a grinder and food processor. Emulsifed sausages are those in which the meat and fat have been so finely comminuted that you can no longer visually distinguish them in the cross-section of the sliced sausages: they have become a completely uniform, homogenous paste.
This is a style of sausage for which several of my trusted recipe sources often get the procecure wrong. The most common error is putting the ground meat and fat in the processor at the same time, and then trying desparately to keep the mixture below 4°C. The … Continue reading.
This post is about making better beef sausages, without the use of pork or pork fat. We’re after an all-beef link that has the cohesive, juicy texture of a pork sausage.
To make a simple, fresh pork sausage we start with pork butt, ensure it contains about 25% fat (adding fatback as necessary), cube it, chill it, grind it, add 1.5% salt and 5% water by weight of pork, then mix until it binds. This yields a cohesive, juicy sausage. If we do the exact same thing with beef, say, bottom blade, which is analogous to pork butt, the final sausage will be fine, but it will not have the same, well-bound, juicy … Continue reading.
There are a few terrines and pâtés in the Eleven Madison Park cookbook that are capped with gelée. One that especially interested me is rabbit rillette topped with violet mustard gelée. I had only ever seen rillette topped with rendered lard, not a gelatin-rich liquid. Also I had only seen rillette presented in a ramekin, or perhaps shaped into quenelles, or spread on toast; I had never seen it treated more like a terrine, sliced into tidy rectangles. It’s a great example of the finesse that distinguishes these dishes from ones you would get in a bistro or brasserie. I set out to make my own version of terrine de rillette with gelée.
No matter the type of liver – pork, veal, chicken, duck – I generally use this recipe, which combines liver with equal parts pork shoulder by weight.
Because I am typically working with the giblets from only one bird, I’ve never had enough turkey liver on hand to do anything more than sauté it with onions and mushrooms and eat it on toast. This past week at work we were running a holiday menu and ended up with the giblets from several birds, so I set aside a pound of turkey livers to make a terrine.
One of the reasons I love teaching sausage-making classes is that I often learn something from the students.
There was a time when I assumed “banger” was just the British dialect word for sausage, and that it didn’t necessarily imply anything about the ingredients or technique any more than “sausage” would in North America. Turns out that is not quite true. One Scottish student of mine asked where he could procure the rusk necessary to make bangers. I had never heard of rusk. The word can refer to two different things: sliced bread that has been baked or toasted until crispy throughout (like a Melba toast), or crumbs that have been made from such a bread.
Chicken sausages with mashed potato and squash, braised red sauerkraut, apples, and gravy
Every Saturday the owner of Sunworks Farm is at the Strathcona Market griddling his chicken sausages and doling samples to passers-by.
I’m usually wary of chicken sausages. They’re often dry and mealy with no structure. The main difficulty in making sausage from poultry is the very low ratio of fat to lean, nowhere near the desired 1:3 that is easily achieved with pork.
Anyways many years ago I gambled on the Sunworks chicken sausage sample and was happy to find it was one of the best I’d ever eaten. My pleasure quickly turned to curiosity and I wondered aloud how they made it so juicy. Was there … Continue reading.
In Vienna these links are called Frankfurter Würstl, named for the city Frankfurt am Main in Germany. In most of the rest of the world (including Frankfurt) they are called Wieners, which means “Viennese.” Go figure. Whatever you call them they are the ancestor of the North American hot dog.
The old world version is usually 100% pork in delicate lamb casings, lightly smoked. North American hot dogs can be pork, beef, or a combination of the two, usually in synthetic casings.
I link mine extra long, so they barely fit on a dinner plate.
To emulate the very fine texture of the commercial varieties I grind twice through a 3/16″ plate, and then do a lengthy mixing phase, roughly … Continue reading.
Pepperoni sticks are a great introduction to air-drying cured meat at home. The process is very quick and very forgiving: even if you don’t have a whiz-bang curing chamber with perfect temperature and humidity control, you can probably make these pepperoni sticks at home and be very pleased with the result. And if for some reason you are worried that the whole process has gone sideways, just hot-smoke them or cook them and they will still be delicious. This is one of the recipes we make in my More Charcuterie at Home class, which is all about curing and air-drying meats.
These are meant to emulate the pepperoni sticks you get at gas station convenience stores. The recipe was developed … Continue reading.
The personal website of Edmonton chef Allan Suddaby
