It's our inner fat girls that give Matt and I our kicks of inspiration for our next indulgence. This usually involves us salivating at the mere description and talking like valley girls:
"OMG! Shut your mouth, that sounds sooooo good!" -Matt
Our latest kick happened at 1am last night. I can't even remember what got us on the topic of sausage, but that's where we ended up. Salivating over Googled recipes and images of various kinds of sausage.
Yeah. We're fatties alright.
Matt loves his Chorizo, so that was obviously a must. I love Chorizo too...I just love pork. So much...so freaking much. But then I came across an interesting recipe for a Greek sausage. Loukaniko. And of course we haaaad to make this as well : )
Here is a link to the recipes we used:
Loukaniko Recipe
Chorizo Recipe
The Loukaniko originally caught my eye because it not only called for wine (yay!) but orange zest as well. Usually I absolutely detest orange zest. To be honest, I fucking hate it. Terrible in carrot cake and don't even get me started on why anyone would put it in a chicken salad. But here it was in a sausage recipe and I was intrigued. What I gathered from my research was that this was a sausage from Greece and each region has their own take on it. One region used leek onions instead of orange peel. Other regions have their own unique curing process. I decided, for whatever possessed me, to stick with the orange zest.
As we wiped up our drool from our food porn that night, we decided to go on a meat spree in the morning. We hit up Sobie Meats for our pork butt and hog casing, went to Frank's Market to look for lamb. Unfortunately we had to go to Meijer's for that. It's been duly noted that we'll have to call in ahead of time if we want to order a fresh chunk of lamb.
We got home and dived right into our tasks. While making sausage, we were simultaneously researching how to make sausage. Yes, we were that anxious to get at some lovely meats.
Matt started dicing up the pork and lamb as I put all the spices in order. We skipped the cure because we didn't want to deal with nitrates or nitrites. We also didn't bother with the powdered milk.
It was right around the time of grinding the Loukanika that we decided to check out Alton Brown's Good Eats episode on making sausage.
Sneaky Alton...almost had us worried that hog casing would be too tricky. Not for the hands of Matt and I apparently! But we figured out how to twist the casings once they were all stuffed.
Peek-A-Boo!
We cooked up some samples of the Loukanika and it was amazing! Orange zest and all! Makes me a little sad that we only made half the recipe...you know, just in case the zest just wasn't working for me. This recipe is fantastic and I would definitely make this again. The orange was subtle but detectable and worked well with the rest of the spices. This made me so excited, Matt even dropped some off at Siciliano's!
The chorizo, we found out, had to set for three hours in the vinegar before grinding it. So I finished that later on in the day. It was a pretty good recipe but i'll have to do more research. I threw in some cayenne even though it never called for it. I remember chorizo always being pretty spicy. I'll have to kick it up even more next time. The recipe called for paprika but I used up the rest of that smoked Spanish paprika instead. I'll have to get a whole bag of that at Penzey's next time I go, as that worked really well in the chorizo.
Chorizo.
We decided not to put any of this in casing. Matt and I enjoy making huevos con migas but have never put chorizo in it. Now we can ^_^
There is still plenty of casing leftover that I'm sure we'll use up on Sunday.
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