Merguez, Sausage and Chorizo making with Carlos

Carlos and I occasionally hunt together; he is a pheasant/grouse/duck fanatic and is generally obsessed with gathering wild meats.  When he sees a deer or antelope or elk I can almost see the little cartoon bubbles floating up from his head with images of steaming roasts and other dishes.   His regular hunting partners are named Teal and Lola;   Teal is a Pointing Griffon, and Lola is an accident, a mix of Pointing Griffon and a German Wirehair that turns out to be a great bird dog.

Carlos and I made sausages and chorizo last Sunday at his house.   I took a fresh loaf of no-knead bread, a bottle of Rioja and 7 pounds of elk meat.  Carlos provided a large pork shoulder, back fat, spices and the fermentation agent and nitrites for the salami.  While we stuffed sausages, Martha cooked us a nice linguine with shrimp and truffle oil.   It certainly is more fun to undertake a sausage making project with a friend, good food and a bottle of wine (a Rioja).  We made a spicy Italian sausage and a Merguez using a mixture of elk and pork. The recipes were adapted from Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn's book Charcuterie

I should have paid more attention to recipes, ratios  and ingredients but that's part of the pleasure of working in someone else's kitchen, you're not in charge.  You can just relax and do what you're told.  As I recall, and I know that we didn't write it down anywhere but maybe Carlos remembers,  we made the Merguez  following the recipe except that we substituted elk for the lamb.  The Italian sausage was a mixture of  about 2/3 elk and 1/3 pork.   The chorizo, which is cured with nitrites and salt and fermented salami is not cooked but aged for a couple of  months and we made it following the recipe in Ruhlman.

This the first attempt for either of us making a dry aged fermented salami. Carlos is a real scientist, he labels himself  a physiological ecologist, so I was quite content to following his lead on this somewhat more technical form of charcuterie.  In my incomplete understanding, you add sodium nitrite as a preservative to prevent the growth of botulism and add a fermenting agent to get the curing process going.  I don't own a copy of the Ruhlman book and now I can not recall if is it sodium nitrite, sodium nitrate or possibly a mixture of both. I really should have been paying more attention.   The Chorizo recipe  is one point where I understand the Ruhlman/Polcyn book contains a rather serious typo regarding the amount of fermenting agent  to add.  There is an explanation buried somewhere here.

On all sausage blogs there are such fine photos of the salamis hanging to cure.  They often are hanging on metal racks in white tiled rooms.  It turns out to be a more difficult than you might imagine to find a clean, cool, dry  place to hang a salami to cure.  Carlos put his in the crawlspace under his house, not as bad as it might sound, but still not a white tiled room.  I hung mine in the utility room which does stay cool, but which is open to the kitchen.  A few days after hanging them I discovered that the dog had uncharacteristically nipped of the bottoms of two of the links; so much for sterile conditions.  Matt Wright who writes the Wrigthfood Blog has some really interesting  plans for an inexpensive home curing setup.

I used some of the Merguez in a paella and it was great.  Haven't tried the finished Italian links yet and we're still waiting for what's left of the chorizo age.

Game Meat Charcuterie

For a number of reasons I butcher my own game meat. It's hard work and usually takes me two days to butcher and wrap an elk for the freezer, this is after it has been quartered, skinned bagged and hung. I am  a slow butcher.   One benefit  of hiring a butcher is that they will typically offer to make sausages as part of the order.  Until now, I have not done so for myself.

Aside from the sausages, there are a number of downsides to hiring a butcher. For one thing, it's expensive.  Last time I checked, it would have cost me $250 to have an elk butchered that had already been skinned, quartered, bagged and hung (that price did not include sausages.) For another, there's really no telling whose meat you'll get back.  This is an issue because there is CWD in the deer and elk herd here in SE Wyoming.  Even though there is no known risk to humans, I have my animals tested at the Wyoming state vet lab before eating them.  I only want the meat from my own animal.  Also, and perhaps most importantly, the local butchers never have enough space or time during the rush of hunting season to hang the meat as long as is needed.


Here is my recipe, sort of cobbled together from sources on the internet and an article in Saveur No. 31 (December 1998).

2                           Natural Sausage Casings (about 4' long each)
2 1/2 lbs                Elk (ground)
2 1/2 lbs                Pork shoulder (ground)
1/2 lb                    bacon (ground)
paprika                 cover and mix 4 times
fennel seed            cover and mix 3 times
oregano                 cover and mix 3 times
garlic                     10 cloves (finely chopped)
red-pepper flake   sparsely cover and mix 3 times
black pepper         cover and mix 4 times
                             (coarsely cracked with mortar and pestle)
salt                        cover and mix 4 times
cayenne                 lightly dusted and mixed 1 time (optional)

Some things I did not have were fatback which would have been better than bacon  and I would have used hot paprika instead of the sweet variety, but I was out.  Choose a pork shoulder with as much fat on it as you can find.

The casings come salted and you need to rinse them and then soak them in cold water while you prepare the forcemeat filling.    Grind the meat.   I cook by taste and feel and have specified spices in my recipe very roughly. You obviously can not taste the uncooked forcemeat  but you can fry up a bit to check the spicing as you go. My instructions "cover and mix" mean to evenly cover the meat mixture with the ingredient  (you can see the size of the bowl I was using) and then to mix thoroughly. The Saveur article recommended chopping rather than grinding the meat though I did grind it.  I did not have fatback pork to add and so used bacon.   The fennel seed gives it a distinctive sausage flavor.  The red pepper flakes are potentially hot though mine are not really.  Reading the recipe you might think these sausages turned out overly spicy, but they are not.  Of course that's a matter of personal taste,but for some reference I will say that I have never been a fan of very hot food that so many people seem to like.

Stuffing the casings was a new experience.  You slide the casing onto the stuffing tube and then tie a knot in the end.  I removed the cutters from the grinder and just used it to force the meat into the casings.  As you go you twist them into the length of sausage you want.  It is almost a three handed operation, pushing the meat into the grinder, cranking and holding the casing as it fills.  After the first 4 feet of sausage, I added the cayenne and made a second batch that was hotter.  Packing the second batch I realized the casings were more elastic than I'd thought at first and I packed them more tightly.

In the end I think the sausages  would have been better if I'd had more fat in them, but leaner sausages do tend to be more chorizo like.   When I cook them I usually just slice them open and pour in some olive oil.
The spicier batch is a bit more popular, though the less spicy ones are excellent  for breakfast.