It's Sausage Day!

MamaDuck rushed home from her knitting group last Friday night and hid in the bedroom. Ten minutes later she emerged with a bright orange-gift-wrapped parcel with my name on it! It was about the right size to be a pair of cowboy boots, but she wouldn't let me open it till the next morning.

[The following is unsuitable for vegetarians - but if you want to send cowboy boots: size 44 (UK 8.5)].

Next morning came (and being basically a kid, I'd hardly slept), and I opened the package. Woot! A meat grinder / sausage stuffer! So I rushed up to the market, got me a kilo of pork shoulder and asked the guy for some tripas para hacer salchichon (casings for to make sausage). He said he didn't have, but pointed me to an offal stall. The lady there did indeed have tripas, but these were the whole things (chitterlings, in English - bleucch), not the skins. Dang. So I traipsed round every butcher in the market, a butcher's shop nearby, and finally a sausage shop near our house. Nada.

Not to worry. I'd been talking to a friend about my banger-making ambitions, and she said she sometimes makes them. She got her tripas from the butcher across the road from her flat in Malasaña, so I went there. No joy. But I remembered seeing a place mentioned on the blog of two guys who make their own bangers in Madrid (thepropersausage.blogspot.com). Sadly, I couldn't remember the address or even the area, so I abandoned the search and went home.

Yesterday I assembled the meat/rusk/herb/spice mix, and this morning I went to the shop (c/Atocha 95, if you're interested). They wouldn't sell me less than 25m (€6), but apparently it'll keep for a year or two in the fridge.

I don't know quite what I was expecting, but I was surprised to see I'd apparently bought a bag of dead worms. It was a plain bag - no branding, no info, no nuffin. I opened it and pulled out this hank of shrivelled guts packed in rock salt. I pulled out a couple of metres of it (not unlike unravelling a skein of wool, but a bit smellier, obviously), and put it in lukewarm water to soak.



I've seen a YouTube video where somebody rinses water through it, so I tried that and it worked!



After a couple more hours of soaking, I steeled my nerves, assembled the equipment (half of which had spent the last 30 minutes in the freezer because colder is better for this kind of work), and threaded the casing onto the nozzle of the machine. Then I popped some of the meat mixture into the tray, switched on the machine, pushed with the pestle and waited for stuff to emerge. It took a while, but eventually, sausage extrusion began to occur, and I tried to ease the casing off the nozzle while manipulating the sausage into a regular shape. I stopped the machine after a bit, because the first eight inches were just way too thick. I cut that off, tried to twist it into two links, and broke the skin. Ho hum, try again.



This time I got the sausage down to a reasonable diameter, squeezing, teasing and coiling as I went. When all the meat mix had gone through the machine, I twisted the coil into links, and made nine fat juicy bangers. Looking at the original two, I decided to scrap them and try again. I pulled the casing off the nozzle much faster this time, and finished up with six narrow-gauge sausages. For a first attempt, I am pretty damn chuffed, and I know they're going to taste great because I fried off a bit of the meat mix this morning and had it in a sandwich for my breakfast.



Nomnomnom.

UPDATE: Guess what we had for tea? Bangers 'n' mash. MamaDuck cut into a sausage and took a bite. 'My God! It's so meaty!' she said. Yep. Absolutely fabulous.

Perfect Pork Pie - Part Three

So, here it is:



I'm the first to admit there's room for improvement, but it was still better than edible. The pastry needs to be firmer to help it hold a better shape. The filling I think will be better once I've got me a grinder and can do it with proper meat. I actually put too much pepper in, and it could have done with a pinch of salt (I try to avoid using salt, but sometimes you've just got to). And the jelly, well, I should have left it alone.  Adding the soy sauce and reducing it more just made it unpleasantly strongly flavoured.

So, I may try this again next week. And given that the alternative in Spain is no pork pies at all, I'm quite happy.

Perfect Pork Pie - Part One

First of all, you might want to skip reading this if you're a vegetarian or in any way pork-averse.

Who's left? Probably only The Fat Expats.

I discovered yesterday (via bloody Twitter, of all things) that we are now into British Pie Week. Actually, BPW is a thing invented by Jus-Rol (makers of frozen pastry for lazy people) to increase sales. On Twitter, you can follow #britishpieweek.

Now, it's a well-known fact in some circles that I am a big fan of pies of all sorts (article here, about halfway down the page, and I also get a mention here), and also a bit of a purist as to what constitutes a pie.  Pie-filling placed in a ceramic dish and baked with an oval of Jus-Rol flaky pastry on top cannot be considered a pie (despite the fact that Jus-Rol's winning 'pie' for BPW was exactly that). A pizza is not a pie, and nor is a pastie, or a quiche, tart, flan or crumble. A pie is this: pastry top and bottom, tasty savoury or sweet stuff inside, sealed at the edges and baked.

By pure coincidence, I had a few chums round for lunch a few days ago, and for the main course I made a rather splendid steak and mushroom pie (it would have been steak and kidney, but one of the guests refuses to eat offal). And MamaDuck, who is currently in Bristol, reported they'd had lunch at a pie shop that goes by the wondrous name of The Pie Minister (there are some things you just wish you'd thought of). So, I've been thinking about pies. Unfortunately they're way too fiddly for me to make just for myself. But I thought I could make a bunch of little pies, and they'd be good for lunch. A couple of years ago I had a phase of making pork pies. They weren't the greatest things, but lots of people loved them. So, inspired by this video, I'm making pork pies right now.

You need three things to make a proper Melton Mowbray-style pork pie: hot water pastry, the pork filling, and the delicious jelly that fills the space between the meat and the pastry. Previously, I've used gelatine for this, but it doesn't really have any flavour, so this time I'm going to attempt my own. I've got onion, celery, carrot and leek which I'll boil up in water with bay leaves, maybe some garlic and certainly some black peppercorns, a sprig of thyme and a couple of cloves. And the magic ingredient, some pigs' trotters, which are high in gelatine and should make the stock set into a nice wobbly jelly.

And, bugger, I've just noticed I haven't actually got pigs' trotters, I've got sheeps' hands. Well, they'll have to do: if they don't work I can always slap some powdered gelatine in.

For the pastry, you need flour and lard. It came as a surprise to me that here in Spain, the pork capital of the universe, lard (manteca) is actually quite hard to get hold of and is surprisingly expensive. I've taken to making my own. Basically all you do is get some slabs of tocino (pork fat, usually attached to skin), cut it into chunks and throw it in a pan on low heat (3/10 on the electric hob). The fat will melt, eventually, and the remaining skin will go brown. (If you like pork scratchings, the skin is not a lot different).

I have made hot water pastry before, but I've never attempted the raising method shown in the video - in my previous attempts I've used a tin. Obviously, if your pie is not in a tin, the pastry will cook more evenly, although it could well turn out to be a funny shape.

I'm gonna post this now: I think the stock needs another hour or two. Meanwhile I'll prep the meat and the pastry. Another post later, with pictures...