Würste! One day in sausage making

NOTE: I lost all the images of this blog post, thanks to my provider. If I’m able to recover them, I’ll add them back, otherwise, this is just the text.

Last Thursday I went to the butcher to order 5 kg of fatty pork and beef. Of course from Neuland. And of course at the lovely butcher with the typically Brandenburg-style-helpful staff. Asking for meat that is rather unpopular and of course not the nicest parts of the animal, my request was answered with the usual “We don’t have something like that and why do you want this anyways? Nobody likes this!”. As usually I tried to be patient and after explaining I want to make some sausages (again, a statement that was replied with a look as if I were from another planet), we found a solution to my problem. Eventually my order was taken and I could collect it this Saturday. What great fun to buy meat in proper quantities :-)

I still ask myself why butchers that try to be eco and organic are unable to sell the meat that usually just ends up somewhere (I hope sausages and not the dump). In the end, animals are treated with the highest dignity, if you use all the parts and try not to trow away anything!

So this Sunday was the day to make Coburg style sausages, Thai spicy sausages, and Thai sour sausages. After a good breakfast with some nice Porridge with Whisky cream (note to self, don’t use too much whisky in the morning, being tipsy after breakfast is not the nicest thing - note to self 2: don’t use Glenfiddich 12 for Porridge), I started with grinding the meat:

First came the Thai spicy sausages. For those, I needed to prepare a red curry paste the day before using the stone age styled technique of mortar and pestle. After around 1.5 hours of smashing up things I ended up with the following:

This was added to some of the pork together with more spices (kaffir lime leaves, coriander), coconut milk, fish sauce, and other stuff and then thoroughly mixed:

After this spa treatment, the sausage filling needed some rest in the fridge and I continued with the Coburg styled sausages. The Coburg styled sausages are made of pork and beef and in my case (erroneously) some smoked bacon. Further they contain (at least to me) a surprising mix of spices using juniper berries, allspice, black pepper, and cumin:

Mixed together, the filling was then stuffed into the sausages

and resulted in the following:

The Coburg style sausage taste great! I have never had anything the like, the mixture with the smoked bacon and the spices result in a very special sausage. The taste is hard to describe, they are more sweet than other sausages and feel more savoury than others. The spices give the sausage a more earthly feel, it is like they come out of the Black forest…

After the Coburg sausage, the Thai spicy sausage needed stuffing. Nothing exciting there, a normal Thai spicy sausage with all the nice lemony and Thai flavours. The only surprise to me was the addition of coconut milk, which made the sausage very creamy. The downside however is, that the filling is more likely to flow out of the casing when cooked and next time I need to make sure the sausages are properly closed.

The third sausage I made was more an experiment. I tried to make Thai sour sausage, which is a pork sausage containing quite a large fraction of sticky rice for fermenting. Using rice for fermenting stuff is common practise in Thai kitchen and produces a very special sour taste. For the sausage, the cooked sticky rice is smashed up together with coriander root and loads of garlic. Then this mixture is added to the pork and then stuffed into the casing. The result:

Afterwards, the sausages are hung up and left uncooled in the open air for about 4 days. The rice will start to ferment the sausage and (at least in theory), the result should be a nice and sour sausage. If this works and whether the sausage turn into something edible or a health hazard still needs to be seen. I will let you know. This is how they look after half a day of hanging:

Not much change, except that the casing is completely dried up, the flies like to sit on them and that some fat is escaping the casing.

If you want, you can try some of these sausages at my birthday party…

The long day in the kitchen ended with a “Rhöni sour” (see separate posting).