Lamb Sausage

A Lamb for all Seasons



Last summer I wrote about Locust Grove Farm and their raw sheep's milk cheeses. That visit was the beginning of a longer association when the cheesemaker, Tim Clark, asked me to make some lamb sausage for him.

I did a lot of research looking for a recipe, but didn't find what I had in mind. Most of the recipes were Middle-Eastern/Arabic and I found a handful of Scots and Irish recipes. But what I was thinking about was something Mediteraean involving garlic and herbs. So I set out to create my own recipe.

The sausage definitely evokes the taste of Spain, Provence, Italy, and Greece.

I made the first batch from some lamb Clark happened to have in his freezer. I ended up with two pounds of sausage that came close to what I wanted, but was still a tad off. I took notes and planned my next effort. Just before Thanksgiving Tim gave me another batch of lamb and I finally got around to making batch two the week before Christmas. It was much better, and this time I packed it into sausage casings. It definitely evokes the taste of Spain, Provence, Italy, and Greece but without being recognizably any single one of those cuisines.

Clark and his partner each got a third of the batch, and I kept the last third. I used some of the sausage to make cassoulet for Christmas dinner and I've got two links left that I'm thinking would be good in a pot of potato chowder.

Lamb Sausage
Makes 3 pounds.

2.5 lb lamb
.5 lb pork fat
4 tbsp minced fresh rosemary
2 tsp cracked black pepper
1 tbsp dried thyme
25 grams fresh garlic — minced
10 grams juniper berries — cracked and chopped
1 tsp Spanish hot paprika
2 tsp kosher salt
1 c red wine — reduced to 1/2 c

Cut lamb and pork fat into 1" chunks. Toss with all remaining ingredients except wine and refrigerate for 12 hours. Spread on a tray and freeze for 1 hour until meat is partially, but not completely, frozen. Chill meat grinder and bowl for 1 hour in fridge.

Grind using a 1/8th inch die. Add reduced wine, and stir to mix. Stuff into medium pork casings.

Sausage is really easy to make, especially if you have a Kitchen Aid stand mixer. Get the grinding and stuffing attachments.

Technorati: Food | recipe | kevin d weeks | seriously good | lamb sausage | sausage | lamb | charcuterie

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Teaser

Teaser



This is farfalle and rotelli pasta with homemade lamb sausage and local sheeps milk cheese. No recipe worth mentioning, except the sausage.

But that recipe isn't quite perfect yet. Almost, but not quite. It needs more wine, a touch of heat, a soupcon more garlic, and the mustard seed is worthless.

When it is perfect I'll share it. In the meantime, with pasta olives, and sauteed onion and bell pepper it's pretty damned good. In fact, it's pretty damned good just fried in skillet.

Technorati: Food | photo | kevin d weeks | seriously good | pasta | lamb | sausage

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Italian Sausage

Sausage is a Shallow Curve



There's something counter-intuitive about the phrase learning curve. Back when I had a real job programming computers for a living the term came up a lot in reference to users learning a program and most folks seemed to think a shallow learning curve was best. The intuition is that shallow is easy and steep is hard because shallow hills are easy to climb and steep hills are hard. But the learning curve's axes are time and amount learned, effort doesn't come into it. This means that a steep learning curve represents a lot learned over a short period of time. Steep learning curves are good.

Yesterday afternoon I made four pounds of Italian sausage — about two pounds more than I should have because it's not great sausage. I made so much because I'm an optimist (or pretend to be) and because I used the recipe in Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn (click here for my review). Charcuterie is one of the two best books on food that I bought last year and one of the best cookbooks (if you can call it that, it's more a primer than a simple collection of recipes) I've ever purchased. Despite earlier travails with sausage, I was sure this book would steer me right because it had on everything else I'd made from it. Nope.

Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our anti-materialistic, otherworldly, New Age spiritual types. But if the material world is merely illusion, an honest guru should be as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu and seaweed slime. ~ Edward Abbey

After making it I tried a sample and it was almost flavorless. The fennel seed, coriander seed, basil, and oregano were way in the background. There wasn't even enough salt in it. The only spices that came out as I hoped were the peppers. There also wasn't enough fat, but I can't really blame the book for that lack. Cuts of meat vary in their fat content and the pork butt I bought had been trimmed too closely and I should have added more.

Based on the sample I'd cooked and eaten, I went back and doubled the fennel, coriander, basil, oregano, and salt. The second sample was much better, but still not great.

But here's where you run into the real trick of sausage making. I could have tweaked the mixture again, but doing a third mix on the batch would have seriously overworked the meat, destroying the texture. Also, I wasn't sure what was needed. Thinking back, I suspect I needed some caraway seed, but I'm not on a first-name basis with caraway seed, or fennel seed either, for that matter. Or mace or anis seed. Finally, the spices in sausage need at least 24 hours to meld properly so today the flavor will be different from yesterday. However, I don't know how it will be different.

To make excellent sausage I need to know the seasonings well and know how they'll interact over time.

So I have four pounds of not-so-great Italian sausage. It'll be fine for cooking with, and in fact that's what I planned on doing with it, which is why instead of stuffing it in casings I made up 1/4 pound balls, but it'll be a while before I get to try making Italian sausage again. And it looks like my sausage learning curve is more shallow than I'd like.

Technorati: Food | italy | sausage | charcuterie | essay

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