Charcuterie_ The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing - Michael Ruhlman [44]
As sausage advocates, Brian and I are also defenders of the good name of fat. When sausages are delicious, it’s usually because they’re loaded with it. Too much fat tends to be the main criticism leveled at sausage, but saying you’d love sausage if only it didn’t have so much fat is like saying you’d love water if only it weren’t so wet. Fat is fundamental to the quality of a sausage, its succulence and flavor. If you must avoid fat for dietary reasons, avoid sausage; we don’t recommend trying to make or work with low-fat sausages—low-fat sausage is an oxymoron to us.
Store-bought sausages can be good, and some are very good. But rarely are they as satisfying as those you can make at home, because you can adapt homemade sausage to your own tastes. You can use the best cuts of meat as opposed to the butcher’s scraps. If you like spicy heat, you can add more, or vary the type of heat—ordinary red pepper flakes can be replaced with ground chipotle pepper or Espelette powder, the superb cayenne-like pepper from the Spanish town of the same name. Or perhaps you like sweet spices such as nutmeg and clove for seasoning a sausage. If you don’t care for pork, turkey and chicken make superlative sausages without compromise. One of the tastiest, juiciest sausage recipes in this book is a chicken sausage with basil, tomatoes, and garlic.
If you do like the flavor of pork, sausages are another of the glories offered by the pig—thus sausage’s place as the linchpin of the charcutier’s trade. While all kinds of meat have been turned into sausage, pork has dominated sausage making since antiquity because of the flavor, quality, and quantity of both its meat and fat. Sausage is also a key garde-manger technique. Today the garde manger is responsible for cold food in a restaurant kitchen—salads and the like—but traditionally this member of the brigade de cuisine was an ingenious scavenger, turning leftovers and trimmings into finished dishes. And the sausage’s original raison d’être was to make use of the trimmings after the main cuts of the pig had been broken down.
For a chef, sausage making is also an effective way to stretch food. Not long ago, for instance, Brian was intending to serve venison loin for a special game dinner at the restaurant and so had ordered a saddle of venison. At the last minute, the number of guests increased, and once he’d removed the loins from the saddle, he realized that they weren’t big enough to feed all the guests. He reconsidered his plan: as he had the whole saddle, and therefore abundant scraps, he decided to season those scraps with paprika, nutmeg, allspice, garlic, and pepper to transform it into a tasty venison sausage (see page 157 for the recipe) rather than to buy another expensive loin at the last minute. The sausage allowed him to serve smaller portions of the venison loin, without reducing the value of each plate. Indeed, he increased the value: he’d not only solved his dilemma, he’d also introduced an additional component to elevate the entrée.
There’s no reason the same reasoning can’t work at home, in terms of what chefs call “total utilization”—or most of us would refer to as “using everything”—extending not-enough-food into exactly enough. Furthermore, knowing how to manipulate food gives you more freedom in the kitchen. For example, if you had to have dinner ready in an hour, and all you had in the fridge was a tough cut of meat, say a lamb shoulder, something that would require hours of slow braising to become tender, you could instead grind it, season the meat with salt and pepper, maybe a little garlic, maybe some herbs (parsley, rosemary, thyme—whatever you happened to have on hand), maybe some chopped sautéed mushroom or onion for moisture, or fat (pork or lamb). You could then sauté this impromptu sausage, as is or formed into patties, or you could wrap those patties in cabbage or grape leaves and braise them. Served with a couscous or pilaf and some vegetables, they’d make an exotic meal. By