I always get a kick out of a new restaurant concept. Besides all the different design stages for the dining room and kitchen there is serious recipe development going on. For a few weeks our staff in our existing restaurant has been consuming numerous sausages - well someone has to eat the little treats.
(duck sausage with coriander and fennel seeds in a bun with red sauerkraut and cranberry mustard)
Stimulating the senses
One of the standouts was a duck sausage seasoned with coriander and fennel seeds. It took a few rounds of trial and error to get it perfected but now we are at a point when you bite into the sausage and it’s excellent – it’s what a sausage should be in my opinion. The casing has a pleasant snap and it has the right resistance. Once you hit the juicy inside it's a pleasure for your mouth to taste a hint of coriander and a touch of fennel, which stimulates the senses. It appears to be perfect in its own way, and indeed it reminds me of sausage eating in the “old country” (I'm Austrian).
Ears & hooves anybody, no thanks
Still to these days Middle European countries such as Austria, Poland, Germany and Italy have their own style of making old world style sausages. Traditional sausage stands can be found plentifully similar to burger restaurants here in the US. Generally it is not the kind of mass produced sausage you will most likely encounter here in America at the sports stadium which is probably produced with bits and pieces of animal parts which I don't even want to mention. Certainly those sausages are part of the sports experience with a cold beer and mustard but these are not the sausages that I’m talking about here. I'm talking about handcrafted sausages made with some of the best meats you can find produced in small batches in-house.
(let's get serious the new sausage equipment arrived)
Piece of cake
For the new restaurant e eagerly awaited our brand new sausage making equipment - a mixer, a 1 1/2 horsepower meat grinder and a sausage stuffer. We were excited like a child must be on it's birthday in front of a big boxed present. I had made sausages before but never with such equipment - which made it a breeze. Grinding, seasoning, mixing and it goes into the casing. A few minutes in the skilled and we had home-made sausages on the plate - it was a piece of cake - and certainly just as delicious.
(pork sausage spiced with cumin seeds and majoran with horseradish mustard)
Duck sausage recipe
I prefer to use lamb casing (28-33 mm diameter). The following recipe will stuff approximately four strings which I twist into links (4-inch long).
4 strings lamb casing (28-33 mm in diameter)
5 pounds fresh Peking duck legs
2 tablespoons Kosher-style salt
2 tablespoons coriander seeds, ground
2 tablespoons fennel seeds, ground
1 tablespoon thyme leafs, chopped
1 cup soy protein (in powdered form)
2 cups cold water
1. Grind duck legs then mix with rest of ingredients.
2. Transfer mixture into a kitchen processor then emulsify until smooth textured.
2. Stuff mixture into casing (with sausage stuffing equipment).
3. Cook/poach sausage in water (155 degree Fahrenheit for 15 minutes) then dry on kitchen paper towel. Cook sausage in a skillet on low heat setting until browned on all sides.
(little Japanese beef links with rainbow radish curls and blueberry mustard)
Chef's sausage tips and tricks
-use a clean coffee grinder to grind spices to a powder
-Keep meat mixture on ice at all steps during the sausage making process (this will make a sausage with good consistency)
-Rinse casing for 1/2 hour under flowing, room temperature tap water (this will rinse off salt and make casing stretchable)
-grease sausage stuffing tube with vegetable oil (this will make sausage stuffing process child's play)
- in case you don't have a sausage stuffer use a pastry bag and pipe into the sausage casing
Chef's note
-soy protein is in the mixture to bind all that terrific duck fat (otherwise it would ooze out during the cooking process)
-the above fresh sausage recipe is not meant to be stored longer then three days in the house-hold refrigerator (38-40 degrees Fahrenheit).
