Snags

NOTE: THIS POST BEGINS A THREE WEEK SERIES, WE'LL BE USING THE ELEMENTS FROM THIS AND NEXT WEEK'S POST TO COMPLETE THE THIRD WEEK'S RECIPE.

“Perhaps,” Brian, a friend and fellow chef said to me, shaking his head, “we should have listened to hundreds of years of tradition.” The tradition he was referring to was that of sausage making, a long and fine tradition indeed. Making sausages is one of the rare instances in savory cooking (as opposed to pastry work) where science meets creativity. Crafting a sausage requires strict adherence to certain, long-established ratios of fat-to-meat-to-salt. There are other rules as well, regarding the number of times you pass the meat through a mincer, the temperature of the meat, and more. Obviously, there is plenty of room for improvisation and tweaking, leading to a near-infinite different types of sausages. Know this: all of them, if they taste good at all, fall within the guidelines set forth by countless generations of sausage makers.

Foolishly, the sausages Brian and I had just produced, did not.

Making a sausage from scratch is a lot of work. No. A ridiculous amount of work. As with most things I consume, I don't think I'd eat them nearly as often if I had to make my own. Snags, as they are called in OZ, are possibly the cheapest thing you can buy at your local butcher, but I don't understand why. Sure, they are the final resting place for all the little bits and offcuts which can't be sold otherwise, but taking those bits and offcuts and turning them into something delicious is time-consuming, physical (especially if you use a hand-cranked mincer, as I do), dirty, and tedious.



First you must determine the ratios of your various ingredients. Generally, a sausage is around 25-35% fat. You can easily figure this out if you are using lean meat and pork fat, as is often the case, but if you are using a fatty meat, well, the ratios get a little more complex. Doubly so if start to mix animals. Then there is the amount of salt, not to mention any of the other flavorings you might want to put in.

Once you've gathered your ingredients in the right proportions you've got to dice the meat, mix it with the flavorings, and then mince it. This process, when done through a hand-cranked mincer can take 5-10 minutes per kilo of meat. Imagine sweating, manually mincing 17 kilos of meat, all the while striving to keep the meat as cold as possible. And then some recipes call for you to mince the meat a second time. Ouch.

After the meat is mixed it needs to be worked in a bowl until it becomes a sticky mass. Large-scale butchery operations use a machine that looks like a concrete mixer to do this. I use a spoon. At this point the sausages can be piped into the casings (skins, or if you'd rather, intestines), which have been salted, rinsed thoroughly, and slid, endless-condom-style, onto a sausage nozzle. This nozzle is attached to the front of the mincer and the meat is passed again through the machine, this time sans blade.

Stuffing casings is a two-man job and in my kitchen we refer to the two jobs as “pitcher” and “catcher” (“bowler” and “keeper” as well). You see, in this step, not only does one person (pitcher) have to re-crank the meat through, but the other guy (catcher) has to control the speed at which the casing feeds, so that the snags are plump but not too taught. Any air bubbles must be removed with a pin, and a uniform thickness maintained throughout. You end up with a really long sausage snake.

Next the sausages must be tied. There are so many fancy methods one can use to tie sausages, but I don't really know any of them. Not well enough to teach anyone else at least. The simple, non-fancy, method involves pinching off a link, turning it towards you, then pinching off a second link roughly the same size and turning it away from you. You repeat this alternating towards and away for the length of the sausage snake.



The snags, if you have followed procedure more or less exactly, are now ready to cook. (Whether that be poaching, frying, cold or hot smoking.)

The sausages which Brian and I made, the ones which prompted his musings about our general disregard for a knowledge base several hundreds of years old, were not made in exactly this way. We might have ignored suggestions to re-mince some of the meat, and our ratios of meat to fat, would have been better measured, rather than eyeballed. We could have paid a bit more attention to the temperature of the mix as a whole as well. I'm speaking in the hypothetical because any one of these mistakes (we probably made all three) would have lead to the roughly 15 kilos of grainy, fatty-yet-dry sausages we produced.

The next batch, with more care, were great. Lesson learned.

Andouille-Style Rabbit Sausages

(I mentioned above that sausages are a two-man job. That's true. Today, my wing-man was my 3 ½-year-old. It's hard work, not complicated work. He pipped the meat and I shaped the sausages. My guy's a little champion. I couldn't have done it without him.)

These highly spiced sausages are traditionally smoked – either hot smoked to cook them through, or cold smoked to add an additional layer of flavor. I've elected not to smoke them at all, as I don't want to completely overpower the flavor of the rabbit. We'll also be using a blend of fatty pork with the lean rabbit.

As I mentioned above, this post is the first in a three-part series. These are intense sausages; you can eat them on their own, as they are delicious, but make sure to save about 500g for the master project.

1 farmed white rabbit

Breakdown the rabbit by first removing the back legs. Pop the hip joints out of socket and cut any connective tissue holding the joint together. Cut the leg muscle away from the body, keeping the knife as close to the backbone as possible so that the leg stays completely intact. Reserve the two hind legs for next week's post.

Using a sharp, flexible knife remove the rest of the meat from the rabbit. Start by cutting two parallel lines in the channels which run down either spine of the animal, the backbones will form two channels for your blade. Working the knife around the ribcage you should be able to remove all the meat from the chest of the animal and cut through the two shoulder joints. Using the point of the knife pierce through the flesh where the spine meets the ribcage of the rabbit and collect the loin which lies inside the chest cavity. Cut, with the knife running along either side of the spine, towards the tail end, until the two sides of meat are free. Cut and scrape the meat from the two front legs. Check all the meat for bone fragments and then dice into 1-2cm chunks. Reserve the bones and keep everything refrigerated.

Alternately, ask your butcher to prep the rabbit for you.



Sausages

Start by preparing about three metres of sheep casings. Soak them in warm water for about an hour and then rinse them. Find one of the ends and squeeze a few drops of oil into the casing. Using pinched fingers, work the oil down the length of the casing, squeezing any excess out the other end. This light oiling will make loading the casing onto the nozzle and feeding it off much easier. Load up the nozzle according to the instructions included with your mincer.

You'll need about 1 kilo of meat to match the spice measurements below. My rabbit yielded about 500g of meat, and I made the rest up with pork neck, a flavorful and fatty (and cheap) cut.

rabbit meat
fatty pork, diced into 1-2cm chunks
(the meat weight total should be 1 kilo)
15g sea salt flakes
1g cayenne pepper
¼ whole nutmeg, grated
1 clove, crushed in a mortal and pestal
1 allspice (pimento) berry, crushed in a mortar and pestal
pinch dried oregano
2 g mustard powder
1g fresh black pepper
2g fresh thyme, leaves only
35g milk powder
1 large brown onion, fine dice
5 cloves garlic, fine dice

Mix all of the ingredients together in a bowl by hand. Mince through your mincer with the smallest die, keeping as cold as possible. Work the mince in a large bowl with a wooden spoon until it is sticky and looks more-or-less homogeneous. Stuff the prepared casings with the mince. Tie into sausages using the towards/away/towards method I described in the post above. Cut the snags apart just before gently pan frying. Yum.

These are great with sauerkraut and mash, but remember, you need to keep about 500g-worth for the final dish we'll make in a couple post's time.