19 January, 2010

Mincing Sausage

Huevo Rancheros con freekeh

The sausage that wasn't, EZ Chicken Chorizo and Freekeh Week.

I wanted to kick off the year with a championship worthy chitterling sausage but instead ended up with The Great Andouillette Wreck. I'll spare you the details but the link will take you to the pictures.

At the same time the family had to eat so I made up some Chorizo. I wanted something not too spicy so the boys would eat it. From a whole chicken I got about two pounds of meat and I ran that through the mincer.

Mincing chicken for chorizo

Now if you don't have your great-grandmother's Universal #1 meat grinder with mincing plate, you can use a Kitchen-Aid grinder attachment or just do it by hand. Here's a link to my instructions to make sausage without a grinder.

Here's the quantities

Chicken Chorizo

2 lbs (900g) Chicken minced
10 g salt
5 g summac*
15 g Paprika
1 g dried marjoram
1 bay leaf
1 g canela (Ceylon "Mexican" cinnamon)**
20 g (4 cloves) garlic minced
5 g dry milk powder (optional)
15-30 ml cider vinegar

Nicely grind salt and spices and mix into chicken. Continue to stir while adding garlic, milk powder and finally vinegar. Allow mixture to rest a few hours before cooking in a skillet.

Sumac
*Summac is a spice I just started playing with, it's used a lot in Middle Eastern cooking and it's part of the spice blend, za'atar. Straight out of the bag, the flavor gives hint of Nacho Cheese Doritos. I have also been using it on top of focaccia. I will be using it a lot more.

Focaccia with sumac

Anyway it's processed with salt so if you don't use it in the chorizo recipe up the salt a bit, I usually salt 7 g (1 tsp flake) per pound of meat.

**Canela - "Mexican" cinnamon, true cinnamon, Ceylon cinnamon, NOT cassia. I talk about the differences between Canela and what we Americans call cinnamon in another post about Chorizo. Find canela at a grocery that specializes in Hispanic items or visit your favorite spice merchant. OR use the brutish cassia that's in the cupboard, just use a little less than called for in the recipe.

Since I wanted this chorizo to be kid friendly it's pretty mild, feel free to jazz it up. Over the past week we have had this sausage several different ways, but my favorite way is cooked up with potato and onion for breakfast.

Freekeh Week

Freekeh Week

By Thursday of last week, Bonne Femme figured out it I was putting freekeh into all of our dinners. I love the smoky flavor of this roasted wheat (click on the picture to see a list of what I made), BUT this stuff is full of rocks and it really needs a hard sort. I spread it out on a baking sheet and go through it grain by grain. I so far have bought two packages of freekeh each having about the same percentage of debris. I will investigate further.

In the meantime I came up with a great recipe using it ground up: Freekeh tortilla.

Freekeh Tortilla

This is a somewhere between an actual tortilla and a crêpe.

Yield about six

70g /2.5 oz/ 1/2 cup ground freekeh*
70g /2.5 oz 1/2 cup AP flour
4g / 1/2 tsp baking powder
Salt
Water
Oil for cooking

Combine the dry ingredients with enough water to make a pourable batter(a cup or more). Using an oiled non-stick pan, cook the tortilla like a pancake.

Freekeh Tortilla in the skillet

I used this savory flat bread for huevos rancheros (picture at the top). I think it's worth the hassle.

*What do I mean by hassle? Grinding freekeh. I used spice grinder to pulverize the freekeh and a fine sieve to sort it out, re-pulverize un-sifted bits, etc.

Most gluttonous gluttony coming soon, did someone say snails?

Cheers.

5 comments:

Andrew said...

I think the andoullette failure is blog worthy. Kroger had a sale on chitterlings a while back, and I picked up twenty pounds worth. They weren't cleaned, so you can imagine the smell. Uncleaned chitterlings are basically bacteria piles, so I eventually tossed them. Epic fail.

mac said...

Andrew- Thanks for checking in- I'll try to put up some of the research I did for Andouillettes. The chitterlings I got looked very clean, of course I have never seen a unclean one, however the smell...well, if you ever wondered what a slaughterhouse smells like stick you head into a bucket of frozen chitlins. Marinating and simmering tempered the odor and the taste of the exploded saucisses seemed like it would do nicely on a bed of mashers with a mustard sauce. Yet after consistent groans from members of my household, I packed it in. I may try it again, but I am becoming aware of my lower limits.

Cheers.

Darrin McCowan said...

Nice use of freekeh. I started using it when I took a middle eastern cuisine class over a year ago. I like to make a freekeh taboule with it too. Like the idea of grinding it. It is a great nd unique source of smokiness where you wouldn't expect it!

Darrin

mac said...

Darrin - Thanks for writing- The freekeh is fun, and this tortilla is worth trying. Maybe I'm the last person on the internets to figure this out, but freekeh really has the smoky flavor of bacon. Good luck with Low on the Hog, it looks good.

Darrin McCowan said...

The smokiness in the freekeh comes from the fact they burn the field while the wheat is still green enough to not be destroyed in the process. Seems genius, but likely came by happy accident!

thanks for stopping by LotH!