Kosher Blog

Making a Turducken, Part 2 – Andouille Sausage

In Part 1 I had chosen the recipes that I was going to use to make my Turducken. Now I’ll start on the prep work. Andouille Dressing (or Stuffing) requires Andouille sausage, and wouldn’t you know it – I was all out. OK, I didn’t actually have any to start with, but I had dabbled in sausage making before, so I just needed to make my own. What is Andouille sausage? Well, I’d never had any, but it is a Cajun sausage – and my experiences with Cajun food have been very delicious. It’s described as a spicy, smoked sausage – what more do you need to know? Let’s start with the recipe. I took this recipe from ‘Bruce Aidell’s Complete Sausage Book‘, p. 44 – Cajun Style Andouille.

3 T sweet paprika
2 T minced garlic
2 T kosher salt
2 T sugar
1 T freshly ground black pepper
1 t crushed dried hot red pepper
½ t dried thyme
¼ t ground mace
1 t curing salts (optional)
5 pounds pork butt, fat and lean separated, cut into 2″ chunks
½ C water
Sausage casings

Until the curing salts, it’s all commonly available stuff. Let’s talk about the three less-common ingredients. “Curing salts” is a generic term for a mixture containing sodium-nitrate and/or -nitrite, and some other ingredients to simplify its usage. Morton’s Salt makes a product called “Tender Quick” – it’s .5% -nitrite and .5% -nitrate in a mixture of sugar and salt designed to be neutral in flavor. It’s also O-U certified. What do we need curing salt for? It’s used to make the mixture inhospitable to food-borne bacteria, so later the sausage can be smoked for long periods of time at temperatures that bacteria would normally thrive in. As an added benefit, meat that it treated with curing salts stays pink, even when cooked. It’s how we (or at least I) expect sausages to look.

Now let’s talk about pork butt. If you’re not aware, the ‘butt’ does not come from the rear-end of a pig – it’s actually a shoulder roast. Why is it called a butt? I don’t know – it’s not something we regularly discuss at the Shabbos table. What we need to determine is what can we replace it with to make this recipe kosher. Fortunately, I watch a lot of cooking shows – the one that comes to the rescue here is Good Eats with Alton Brown. In his episode on making sausage, he states that an average pork butt is 20% fat. Fine. For 5 pounds of pork butt, I’ll need 4 pounds of some kosher meat and 1 pound of fat. I choose to use veal stew meat. Makes sense to me, since both veal and pork are ‘white’ meats. To match my fat quota, I ask the butcher for a pound of hard beef-fat. He was more than happy to oblige and it didn’t cost a thing. Specifying ‘hard fat’ is important because having solid pieces of fat in your sausage is important to the finished product. If the fat is the softer kind it will melt before your sausages are finished and your product will end up dry.

The final ingredient that you probably don’t have in your pantry is kosher sausage casings. The optimal casing for sausages is pork or beef intestines. I’m told that it’s illegal to sell intestines to the general public – at least in New York. And besides, who wants to eat intestines? I’ll leave that kind of things for the people who eat Haggis. If you google for “kosher sausage casings“, you will find kosher collagen casings from Devro. These casings are very manageable and shelf stable. They last for years in a cool dry place. Stuffing them is quite easy – they come ’shirred’, which means scrunched up like an accordion. Slip a length of it over your sausage-stuffer and it will expand as you fill it. In case you’re wondering, collagen is a protein that is extracted from cowhides. (The Devro website makes it sound like the cows are Orthodox, too. Just kidding.) The Hechser is available, here. The U.S. distributor was kind enough to send me a sample case. I have enough for the next ten years.

The procedure is fairly simple: Mix the spices together and toss most of it with the meat and some of it with the fat. Get it all good and covered. Refrigerate separately overnight.

The next day, it’s time to pull out the meat grinder. I use the meat grinder attachment on my Kitchenaid mixer. The meat gets ground with the small-hole disc, and the fat gets ground with the large-hole disc. Everything needs to be really cold when you grind, because any heat will start melting the fat – and like I said before, you need as much of the fat as you can get, to insure a juicy product. Did I mention that I’m currently on the Atkins diet, and that I can eat greasy meat products all day long? When the meat & fat are ground, add the water and knead the mixture well to evenly distribute everything. This mix goes back in the fridge while I ready my sausage stuffer.

Now, Kitchenaid makes a sausage stuffer attachment to use with the meat grinder attachment, but I don’t like it. Why? For two reasons. The attachment uses the same screw-mechanism to push the meat as was used to grind the meat. When putting already ground meat through it, I find that it makes a paste of everything – too much friction. More importantly, it’s not powerful enough for me. Do you remember the show Home Improvement, with Tim Allen? Remember the trademark “More Power!” and the Neanderthal grunts that accompanied it? That’s me in the kitchen – I like to do things in a big way. That’s why I own a Dakotah Water-Powered Sausage Stuffer. It’s about 2-feet long, has a 10-pound capacity and it’s powered by water pressure from a garden hose. This is a sausage-making monster. The whole batch of sausage fits into the chamber in one shot. I slip a length of sausage casing over the output nozzle and tie the end. When the inlet-valve on the stuffer is opened, water starts filling the space behind the plunger. When the pressure gets strong enough the plunger and the meat will start moving towards the stuffer nozzle, and into the sausage casing that I’m holding on the end. It takes a little practice to get it just right – you need to hold the casing so that it moves at the right speed. Too fast, and the casing won’t be filled enough. Too slow, and you could pop the casing. It took me about 5 minutes to stuff the whole batch. It took another 7 minutes to twist the sausages into 4-5″ lengths. Aidell’s book details the whole process. I tied a knot in the last one, and we’re back to the refrigerator for overnight curing. Don’t cover the sausages – they’re supposed to be evaporating. Makes a better surface for the smoking step and the meat will hold together better. Your refrigerator will start to smell from garlic & spices. My wife (who was a little repulsed by the strong smell) was forgiving and I made sure to put a few boxes of baking soda in the fridge when I was done.

After another overnight rest in the refrigerator, the sausages were be ready to be smoked. To be continued…