Love through the stomach... » Pork

Making sausage

Valerie — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 16:32:36 +0000

Frying up some home-made sausages.

I decided I needed to try to make my own sausages. My wonderful, wonderful butcher has some great sausages, but really, I wanted to give it a try. To add my own flavors, make my own combinations. It was one of those things I felt the need to try at least once.

Add seasoning before grinding, to make it easier to mix all flavors after grinding

Like many of the foods I feel the need to make, this – yet again – proved to be well worth the little bit of extra work.

The sausage casings needs to be washed before use

It doesn’t mean that I stop buy sausages from my butcher. But it does mean that along with the sausages, I might buy some random, cheaper cuts of meat and some pork intestines as well.

Grind the meat at a setting you like. Do you want chunky sausage, or really fine?

Making sausages is fun. It really is. It’s easy too and the finished product is tasty. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Mix and knead the ground meat to make sure all the flavors are well-distributed

Now the pictures you see here and the recipe that follows are a simple pork sausage with some French herbs. But as with most home-made foods, the key is to use your own imagination. To make combinations you think might be tasty. Have fun with it. I sure did!

The sausage stuffer.

There are a few things to take into consideration when making sausages.

You place the entire length of casing over the stuffer, then pull it off as you fill.

First: Make sure that you have a way to get the meat into the casing. A sausage stuffer attachment for a stand mixer is awesome, but any type of funnel should work.

Pull the casing off the stuffer as it's being filled.

Second: Any good butcher makes some of his own sausages. He’ll be able to sell you some casings.

Keep filling the casing into one giant sausage.

Third: Fat equals flavor and moisture. Completely lean sausage will taste terrible, so don’t shy away from fat.

Twist the casing to create individual sausage links.

Pork sausages with french herbs

Author: Valerie

Prep time: 45 mins

Cook time: 15 mins

Total time: 1 hour

Ingredients

about 350 grams of lean pork
about 150 grams of fatty pork (pork belly)
1 onion
2 cloves garlic
a generous amount of herbes de provence
salt and pepper to taste
1 pork intestine (or other type of sausage casing)

Instructions

Cut the pork in 1 inch cubes, dice the onion and cut up the garlic, place all in a bowl with a generous amount of herbes de provence and salt and pepper to taste.
Grind the meat together the herbs in a meat grinder. Knead the ground meat to make sure all seasoning and meats are well combined. Add onions and garlic before or after grinding, depending on whether you like larger pieces of onion in there or not.
Wash the sausage casing and place it on a sausage stuffer. Tie a knot on the end of the casing.
Push the meat mixture down the sausage stuffer while moving the casing along with the meat stuffing to create one long sausage.
Once all the meat is inside the casing, twist the sausage at your preferred length to make individual sausage links, then cut off the excess sausage casing.
Cook the sausage like you would do with a store-bought sausage. You can also freeze them.

Notes

You can vary endlessly with the types of seasoning and filling you use. Just make sure you do use a generous amount of fatty meat, so the sausage doesn’t dry out when you cook it.

A bowl of home-made sausage links.

Either you like bacon…

Valerie — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 20:51:57 +0000

… or you’re wrong.

Yumm

(And for those of you who don’t eat pork. There’s a reason they invented turkey bacon.)

Happy spring you all!

Back to the grill

Valerie — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 18:32:31 +0000

Thick, juicy seasoned ribs are ready to be smoked and grilled.

Way back in September or so, I ran out of gas on my grill. Since it was getting colder and the weather was getting nastier, I kept postponing the refill (or forgetting if that’s what you want to call it…)

When buying all my seeds and soil and stuff for my garden, I realized I could buy my refill right there and so next to gardening season, grilling season was opened again as well.

I started out grilling some of the best burgers I’ve ever grilled. Good quality beef with some great seasoning and grated semi-aged farm cheese. It doesn’t get much better than that if you talk burgers. Grilling, however, can always get better when you move on to ribs. I’ve mentioned my ribs on here before. Seasoned with an award winning rub and slowly cooked away from direct heat with some good smoking chips added to the grill.

When mentioning those ribs back them, I also mentioned that the key to awesome ribs, is the removal of the membrane. It allows the flavors to truly seep through, not only the seasoning, but the smoke as well. And the slow grilling makes them fall-of-the-bone delicious. Sure, full on smoking them for 12 hours as they do in great BBQ joints is better. I’m not going to deny that. But if you have a busy life doing it my way will still give you awesome ribs, without having to spend 12 hours.

Removing the membrane from the rib; use a paper towel and just do it!

As soon as you know how it’s done, it really is very easy. You take a regular dinner knife, with a rounded top, and pry it under the membrane in a corner somewhere. You just need to lift it a little to get a start. Don’t use a very sharp knife, as that’ll just tear the membrane.

Once you have a little starting point, you just pull. The membrane and the ribs will be slippery, so holding the membrane with a paper towel while you pull makes this job a whole lot easier.

Sprinkle on the seasoning, I use 'Team Sweet Mama Kansas City rub'

Once all the membrane is taken off (you might have to do it in pieces, if it rips), you season your ribs on all sides with a good rib rub and let it sit for a short time while you heat up the grill.

Make sure to season on both sides of the ribs.

We’re using indirect heat, so light only 1 half of the grill. Place an aluminum bowl with some smoke chips over the flames. The directions for your smoke chips will be on the bags. Some need to be soaked, some don’t.

Close the lid and let the grill heat up. As soon as you see some smoke escaping, your grill is ready to put the ribs on there.

Make sure you give your ribs a good rub before putting them on the grill, it really helps them soak up the flavor.

Place the ribs on the other side of the grill, the side where there is no fire. Check on them after about half an hour, turn them over and brush them with a solution of vinegar, ketchup and the rib rub. Continue doing so every 20 to 30 minutes until the meat is fully cooked. Depending on the thickness of the ribs this may take between 1 to 2 1/2 hours. If it’s going too slow you may place it closer to the flames (or even on top) after an hour to speed things up.

Make sure the temperature under the hood of your grill is always between 125 and 150 degrees celsius, lower than that and it will actually take forever.

Enjoy your fall off the bone, delicious, awesome smoky ribs.

Guanciale (pasta all’amatriciana)

Valerie — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 17:01:01 +0000

Guanciale, one of Italy's tastiest secrets.

If you’ve ever read this blog before and/or haven’t been hiding under a rock, you know that I love Italian delicacies. Unfortunately with the exception of prosciutto di Parma and Parmigiano and Pecorino, most Italian meats and cheeses are either hard to come by outside of Italy, or extremely expensive. Sure, knock-offs are widely available since Italian food has become immensely popular around the globe, but the true taste of Italy is hard to come by.

One of these delicacies is guanciale. Guanciale translates to ‘little cheeks’, but there’s nothing little about it – not in size, nor in flavor. Guanciale is a cheek though. It’s a pork cheek, cured and generously seasoned with amongst other spices, lots of black pepper. Guanciale looks a little like bacon, the consistency and taste however is much, much more delicate.

When we visited Milan last month I brought back a guanciale. I also brought two different sausages and a piece of speck, 3 different cheeses (large chunks) and 4 kilos of flour home with me, but today I’m writing about the guanciale.

Guanciale is for sale at every supermarket or butcher.

One side is heavily seasoned, the other side has the chewy (cleaned) skin.

Guanciale is the meat that’s traditionally used for pasta all’amatriciana and pasta alla carbonara. Or that’s what the internet likes me to believe. I absolutely adore guanciale, there is no way to describe it. If you like bacon (and really, who doesn’t) you’ll like guanciale. It’s better than bacon! And no, that’s not heresy, because really it’s just bacon with even more flavor.

The guanciale cut up in strips

The first thing I used my guanciale for (I got a whole piece, so it’s quite large) was for a 1-dish-meal version of Pasta all’Amatriciana. I hadn’t had time to buy groceries and my zucchini plant had shed it’s last fruit, I had guanciale, I had tomatoes, I had pasta and I figured it just had to do.
Do it did! The pasta was delicious, the guanciale gave it just the nice little different kick that you wouldn’t have had with bacon or another meat. It was the perfect way to inaugurate the food I’d smuggled* home!

Adding cheese into the pan before serving

Pasta all’Amatriciana (with extra veggies)

Recipe Type: main

Author: Valerie/Love through the stomach…

Prep time: 5 mins

Cook time: 15 mins

Total time: 20 mins

Serves: 2

This is a variation on the classic pasta all’Amatriciana adding more vegetables to make it a single-course main dish.

Ingredients

short pasta (penne, rigatoni, fussilli etc enough for 2 persons)
200 grams of guanciale (substitute bacon if you don’t have guanciale)
1 package of passata di pomodori (strained tomatoes)
1 or 2 small red chilis (to taste)
1 whole clove of garlic, peeled
1 medium zucchini
plenty of pecorino or parmigiano cheese
olive oil
some small fresh tomatoes (optional)

Instructions

Boil the pasta in plenty salted water.
Drizzle a skillet or heavy bottomed frying pan with a little olive oil, then add the guanciale or bacon, the chili(s) and the garlic and cook them on fairly low heat. You want the Guanciale to release some fat and the chili and garlic to release flavor, be careful not to brown them.
Dice the zucchini (remove the watery inner core) and add to pan. Once the garlic is brown, remove it. Depending on the lever of heat you like, you can either remove the chilis as well or leave them in (or cut them up with or without seeds).
Add the passata di pomodori (strained tomatoes) to the pan, enough to make the amount of sauce you like. I use about 2/3 of a cup.
Drain the pasta when al dente, then add to pan with sauce. If you have them, you can now add some diced fresh tomatoes to the pan as well. Mix well, remove from heat, add a generous amount of cheese, stir the cheese in and serve immediately.

The finished dish, delicious!

*Since I’m within the EU, it obviously wasn’t smuggling, but traveling with 4 kilo’s of white powder and very smelly (garlicy sausages, cheese) in my suitcase, it sortof felt like I did!

Pork chops

Valerie — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 13:44:00 +0000

For a while I thought of pork chops as uninspired. I don’t know exactly when that changed, but it has. The last few months I’ve been buying (mostly boneless) pork chops quite regularly. I’ve grilled them, I’ve pan-fried them, both in butter and in oil, I’ve baked them. They’re quick and easy and as long as you make sure you don’t overcook them, they’re juicy and tender. Quick and easy for a work-night-dinner with a simple pasta, some roasted potatoes or whatever other carb or veggie you like to quickly whip up.

The way I treat them can vary. Sometimes I slice them very thin (in half, or thirds even, about 1/4 to 1/3 of an inch thick) and marinate them for 15 minutes in olive oil, crushed garden and resemary I picked from my garden. Just drop them in a dry skillet, turn once brown and you’re done. They’re great when they’ve cooled off as well, so you can make them in advance and just serve them in a cold dinner with a salad on hot summer evenings.

I’ve also been known to leave them thick, as is, (3/4 of an inch or so) and just salt and pepper them and brown them in butter. It gives them a slightly caramellized, crispy exterior. Very tasty.

Recently I wanted to make portobello-burgers, but it was raining and I don’t like to stand over my grill with an umbrella. also, I’d realized that I’d forgotten to buy buns, which makes the burger concept fade completely anyway. So I changed the concept and topped a couple of fairly thin pork chops with the whole portobello’s and placed them in the oven. The pork and portobello infused eachotehr with their flavors. I quickly added some potato croquettes and voila, a meal!

I love it when quick and easy meals turn into yummy dinners!