City to City

Italian Sausage with Parsley and Cheese.


Another weekend another trip. Sunday we found ourselves in the gentle environs of Naperville. I know, not exactly the wild, but any town where you can crack cans of Modelo at the community pool cannot not be all bad. After an afternoon of showing the kids the proper turns of the can-opener, the sleeper and the suicide, we repaired to the soon to be retired back deck of our longtime friends, Josh and Jen. J&J run a blog called The Wine Commoners, and to accompany the spread J pulled out a bottle Gourt de Mauntens, a Châteauneuf-du-Pape and more cans of Modelo.



An informal spread could include: Pesto, tampanade, baba ganoush and some funky cheeses from Whole Foods.

What about the sausage?



No Sleep till..

This weeks experiment picks up where I left off a few weeks ago when I made Italian sausage from a recipe out of a book. In the comment box of that post I started riffing about sausage from pork shops in Brooklyn, specifically the Parsley and Cheese sausage. Now I haven't been to every sausage joint in the Chicagoland area, but I have never come across P&C sausage. I guess I better make something up:



Italian Sausage with Parsley and Cheese


1275 g Pork shoulder, cubed
18 g salt
7 g white peppercorns
5 g coriander
1 g cayenne pepper
127 g Parmesan cheese cubed and chilled almost frozen
18 g fresh flat parsley chopped
50 ml red wine vinegar, chilled
75 ml cold water

I put the peppercorns (you can use black if you don't have white) and coriander in the grinder for a fine powder. Along with the salt and cayenne I mixed the powder into the cubed pork, then stirred in the very cold cheese and ran the mixture through the small plate of a grinder.

Using the paddle attachment, I gently added the parsley, then the vinegar and water and mixture it until it started to come together about one minute.

I stuffed them into hog casings, twisted them into six inch lengths. If you want that East coast authentico look, stuff them into sheep casings make a big ring and skewer it with a couple of bamboo stakes. whatever you do put them in the fridge to rest, uncovered, overnight.

Meanwhile back in Naperville:

Subterranean suburban rec room blues.

First time wii, now we're livin.

Sausage love in the summer time.

Cheers.