Chorizo

Chorizo - The famous paprika rich pork sausage popular in Spain and Latin America comes in two varieties, cured and fresh. Cured sausage is uncooked and uses high quantities of salt or other curing agents such as sodium nitrate. We made fresh Chorizo, sometimes known as cooking Chorizo.

There are many regional variations, we opted for a Spanish recipe using paprika, fennel, garlic, cayenne and red wine vinegar. We used Bart's sweet smoked paprika made right here in Bristol.

A kilo of pork shoulder (pork butt) seasoned with the spice mix above and salt and black pepper. Place this in the freezer for 30 minutes then mince through the fine mincing plate.

Roll a little of the mince into a small pattie, fry and adjust seasoning as required. Repeat this until the meat is seasoned correctly. We increased the paprika up to 40g for our kilo of pork, 3 garlic cloves and around 2 teaspoons of cayenne and cumin. 

At the tasting stage the sausage was too dry but we had no more fat to add, so we used a beaten egg. This is an easy way to add moisture to a sausage, you can also add suet.

Chill the mixture and fill the sausage casings. (I thought there were plenty of photos on this blog already of sausage casing being filled  here - for example)

The finished Chorizo.

A quick Chorizo based dinner - Chorizo, sautéed potatoes and a fried egg

Verdict

I'm quite happy with our first Chorizo but the sausages are still too dry. We still need to add more fat! Also, next time I would like to use a mixture of sweet and picante paprika.

Chorizo scotch eggs - you can use this mixture to make Chorizo  scotch eggs - blog post on this coming up!

Italian style sausage

The Italian pork sausage is warming combination of dried red chilli, fennel, black pepper and garlic.

This is our first sausage using the new electric meat grinder and sausage stuffer. The electric mincer is much easier to use than the hand grinder and produced a much better quality mince in less time.

1/2 a kilo of pork shoulder (pork butt), this is a good fatty cut so helps moisten the sausage.

Cut the meat into cubes about 2cm X 2 cm and cut the fat into smaller chunks about 1cm X 1cm as it is much tougher than the meat and is harder to grind. Once chopped mix the meat and the fat together in a bowl. Remove the connective tissue and sinew, this will not grind and will add nothing to your final sausage.

Mix dried chilli, salt, black pepper, fennel and chopped fresh garlic

Season the meat with the mixture and then freeze for 30 minutes - 1 hour. This solidifies the meat, stops the fat melting during grinding and results in a better mince consistency.

Grind the meat through the medium grinding plate. Chill the ground meat for 30 minutes and then grind again through the medium plate.

Fit the sausage stuffing attachment with the coarse plate and load on the sausage casing. Normally we use natural hog sausage casing but it was unavailable so we used synthetic sausage casing for the first time. Synthetic casing lasts forever in the fridge but is not as stretchy as natural casing so it is prone to ripping and takes a little getting used to working with. The final product though is pretty good and if you didn't know it was synthetic casing - you wouldn't be able to tell.

We made two large links, firm them up in the fridge overnight.

Italian sausage, fried polenta cakes, roasted pomodoro tomatoes and salad

The final sausage was pretty good, the fennel and chilli are a great combination but the sausage was a little dry. I need to look at ways to moisten the sausage without adding extra fat.

A new dawn

This is the Breville MG1 (link) our new electric meat grinder and sausage stuffer, this should allow us to grind up batches of meat in just a few minutes and stuff it into casings much easier than the hand cranked machine. 

This should arrive in a few days, so look out for new sausages!

Update [13/7]: The sausage machine has arrived! New sausages arriving very soon!

A new mincer is needed

Sadly my mincer died today. It seized completely attempting to grind pork belly for my Chinese style sausages. I am left with a mincer that won't turn and can't be dismantled and a small bowl of ground pork, grey from the metal shavings of the grinding disk.

So while I am on the hunt for something more suitable without having to buy commercial equipment I recommend you avoid those cheap counter top hand crank grinders, they are next to useless if you are grinding meat with any fat content at all.