Make your own sausages! You’ve got nothing Toulouse
Firstly apologies for the awful pun. It’s been a long weekend!
I’d invited some friends around for dinner this weekend and I thought I’d give cassoulet ( my next post) a go, having never cooked it before. As I didn’t have much on this weekend I thought I’d make the Toulouse sausages for it as well (I really should get out more).
The meat mix I used was about 70% pork ( shoulder and belly) 20% smoked bacon and 10% fat.
The other ingredients were about half a head of garlic, juniper berries, pepper, nutmeg, salt and some red wine.
So on with the mincing! I used a reasonably cheap hand mincer which was ok for a while but kept clogging, unfortunately it only had a fine plate and ideally you should use a coarse plate for the right texture. After I had minced half of the meat I hand chopped the rest to keep some bite in the sausage.
Then I mixed all of the meat together with the flavourings and poured on the wine before loading into the sausage skins ( I used hog casings which need soaking before use). It’s best at this stage to fry a little of the mix to make sure the seasoning is right.
I loaded all of the sausage skins in one go and then twisted them into links at the end.
Tasting notes in my next post!
Foodies 100
Rowanwood Kitchen 