{ 2009 01 19 }

Sausage club, part 2

For those of you on the East Coast or in the Midwest, just skip the next sentence or two. The last few days have been that span that tends to happen in January at least once when it is so sunny and glorious that you wonder how anyone ever could ever live anywhere else. And those who know me can tell you I am no San Francisco Bay Area booster. I know there are many other perfectly lovely places to live *and* I have my complaints about this place. But yesterday? Yesterday there was one place to live: here.

And to top it off I got to drive my ass over the Golden Gate Bridge (on a clear day, I ask you, is there anything more spectacular?) to meet up with some other maniacs who, when asked how they’d like to spend a Sunday afternoon, also answered: make sausage. To our ranks was added a chef who works out of the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts, so we got to use their beautiful mess hall kitchen with plenty of counter space. A friend of mine from college was supposed to join us but had to cancel to care for a sick wife and baby, making sausage club part 2 an all-female affair:

Since this was our second go-around, we were able to develop/perfect our techniques a bit: techniques for rinsing the casings, techniques for getting the casing on the stuffing funnel, techniques for stuffing and shaping the casings evenly. And let me tell you what I’ve learned about sausage making so far: the more hand-job like the better the technique. Gentle but firm, rhythmic, smooth — even wet hands — are all key to proper sausage making.

So we gathered, joked (you can imagine), and made sausage. We had the same approach as last time: each person bring ingredients to make 4-5 lbs of a type of sausage, we all help grind and stuff, and then divide the types at the end o everyone takes home 1-2 lbs of each type of sausage. Me? I brought an even garlickier version of the Toulouse-style sausage I made last time. Lisa made some small-batch Jimmy Dean (the secret, we discovered, is a bit of sugar and approximately 1 ton of black pepper). Hope created a crazy-delicious lamb sausage (saved from the dryness of most lamb sausage by the addition of some pork fat) seasoned with plenty of toasted cumin seeds and currants. Katie super-starred by making Italian seasoned elk sausage from elk she helped hunt. Snap!

Posted by Molly Watson on Monday, January 19th, 2009, at 1:31 pm, and filed under cooked it, sausage.

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