making sausage

Finally, skills week came for my team (Jason, Dustin, LaToya, Tishara) and I. Together we made the five mother sauces (bechamel, veloute, brown/espagnole, tomato and hollandaise), which was great fun because we did it all in order with each other, going from one prepped cup of ingredients to another, all the while angling for pans and stovetop space.

After the first day we divided ourselves up for the smaller tasks. Tishara and I decided to make sausage, choosing cajun boudin out of a recipe book.

While a great many sausages utilize pork butt as the main protein, our recipe called for cooked pork butt.



Besides meat there is generally some starch (rice, barley, oatmeal, etc.). Our recipe called for nishiki (short-grained) rice. We didn't have any so we substituted sticky rice. Besides that there were scallions, parsley, oil and spices.



Then we ground up the cooked pork butt into the mix-ins.



And used the sausage machine to shoot the meat mixture into casings.



After the casings were filled, we twisted them into sausage-lengths (kind of like twisting balloon animals). Then we boiled them and tried one - very mushy. Next time I will try using raw meat instead.