Basics: Italian Sausage

"...if you give a man a fish he is hungry again in an hour. If you teach him to catch a fish you do him a good turn."
 
Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie,  Mrs. Dymond (1885)

Time to get your sausage fingers on.

One of the single most useful things you can learn to do, if you cook a fair bit, is to make your own Italian sausage. Pasta sauce, lasagna, risotto, sausage, kale and bean stew, etc., etc. are built on the central pillar of sausage. So much so that their flavor and quality more or less depend on how good the sausage used in it is. Unfortunately, if you've spent much time in the average grocery store meat aisle, you've discovered that most of the commercial sausage out there is complete shit.

This is totally fine.

You can easily leave the world of crap sausage behind and never look back. Of all of the "artisan" food trends out there, making really good sausage is, by far, the easiest to do yourself, without any special equipment, in a few minutes.

What lies below is a all-purpose Eye-talian recipe suitable for most applications. You can easily customize it to your taste by adding or subtracting ingredients. Just remember that not all the stuff in the "Optional" section play well with each other. Fennel pollen is a stand alone. Parmesan, parsley and lemon zest go well together. Rosemary can be added to the existing recipe to make it *nice*, just don't use too much!

THE key to successful sausage it to use GOOD ground pork. Go to a real life butcher shop and get freshly ground pork shoulder or buy a frozen pack of pork at the farmers market, just don't buy the donkey-dookie ground pork they sell at the Stater Brothers, OK?

Italian Sausage:

1 lb. ground pork (80% fat 20% lean)
3-4 cloves garlic, crushed and minced fine
2 Tbsp. decent red wine
2 1/2 tsp. whole fennel seeds, lightly toasted in a dry pan until fragrant
1 rounded tsp. Kosher salt
1/2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
1 tsp. sugar

Optional

Crushed red pepper flakes
Fresh rosemary pulled off the stem and finely minced
Fennel Pollen
Grated Parmesan
Chopped parsley
Lemon zest

First, you're gonna need a big mixing bowl. Plop your ground pork at the bottom of it and simply add all of the ingredients on top, saving the red wine for the last. Now mix the pork and friends together using a dough kneading motion, giving the bowl a quarter turn after each single kneading action. When the sausage firms up and starts sticking to your hand, you're done.

Yeah, that's it. Seriously.

Are you now as angry as I am about how shitty pretty much all the sausage commonly available in these United States is? You should be. It's the direct result of fucking Cultural degeneracy, people! Take the power back. Make some sausage.

p.s.

If you'd like to make linked sausage, get you some 32mm hog casings from the internets or butcher shop and cut off a 3 foot section. Soak this in a warm water for 15 minutes while you cut the top (the mouth to the bottom of the shoulder, like an inverted funnel, which it is going to be.)  off a stout 1 or 1.5 liter water bottle (Fiji bottle work good and the water has free silica in it, or so I've been told) and round off the edges with a bit of sandpaper. Wash your new homemade funnel and slide the hog casing over the bottle neck like you were trying to get a Trojan on a wiener. If wiener jokes bother you, stuffing sausages in NOT for you.  Tie off the end, fill the funnel 1/2 full of meat and start jamming the meat through the neck with your thumb while holding the casings taut with your other hand. Keep doing this, trying to avoid air bubbles as much as possible, until you're out of meat. Tie off the other end flush with the end of the meat and then twist the tube of sausage into 4 equal links.

Finally fold the sausage links over one another till you get this kinda thing:

Refrigerate, uncovered for a few hours to allow the casings to dry out and then snip into links for grilling. Not too hot! Medium heat or they'll blow the fuck up.

Enjoy.

Heavy Horses

Mid-1990's NOS Raichle Eiger Boots, baby hand for scale.

I skipped out on doing a happy weekend post last week. Life, it seems, had other plans for me that involved driving through a snow storm to go to a Raptor center full of misfit owls.  I'll say this, if you are ever up close to an owl you'll notice that they give off a strong vibration. Not spooky. Just intense. If you get bored look up all the mythological shit mapped on owls by the ancient cultures of the world. It seems that they all agree: Owls are heavy, man.

Anyhow, 20 years ago I was big into hiking and backpacking. In 1995 my friend Darren and I somehow managed to make 17 backpacking trips. That year I did 340+/- miles of switchbacks and ridges wearing a $35 pair of Chinese Wolverine work boots I bought at a Walmart in Carson City, NV two Summers before.

This is of note for several reasons:

1) These days doing some sort of sport or activity is really just an excuse to buy a bunch of expensive gear that you probably won't use because the point of the activity is really to obsessively pund on and accumulate gear, not to do the thing that the gear is designed to do.

In 1995 I made $2,300 under the poverty line (I'm not just flexing poverty nuts here, the poverty line will figure into the story in a bit). When you make $12,700 a year you can't afford nice gear. In fact you can't afford any gear that isn't a hand-me-down, from Walmart or bought at an Army/Navy. More to the point, the very fact that I went hiking so much was exactly because it was free and I only needed a $35 pair of work boots, a $15 surplus rucksack and a $3 Nalgene bottle full of tap water to do it.

2) After putting so many miles on a pair of broken down shitkickers I had come to the conclusion that I could really use a nice pair of boots that wouldn't soak up water like a ShamWOW! or allow a mesquite thorn I stepped on to stick into my foot.

Cue my tax refund for 1995. I'm not sure if this is true anymore but back in the mid 90's if you made under the poverty line the IRS would give you back enough tax money to push you above the poverty line. At the time I wasn't thinking that it was some sort of scam was meant to cook the income stats, I was just pumped to get enough money to buy THE NICEST pair of boots I could lay my hands on.

Enter my first pair of Raichle Eigers.

Darren and I drove his blue metal flake '73 Camaro with a tunnel ram to the new REI 20 minutes down the 55 freeway to secure said pair of boots on a Thursday afternoon when we were both off work. I was an idiot. A cartoon hayseed bumbling around a pristine footwear dept. that smelled like the lobby of an Ace hotel in a filthy pair of 501's stained with sweat, dust and sagebrush. I ogled high dollar boots from Italy, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. I had a party boner for a pair of Zamberlans but, like all the other Euro boots, save one, my flat, wide Hobbit feet would not fit inside them without footbound pain or enough room for my feet to rattle around like a pinball. Not good.

My frustrated but diligent Al Bundy finally suggested trying a pair of Swiss Raichles that were the boots that REI rented out to weekend warriors dabbling in dirt and blisters. They were heavy leather throwbacks to the era of exploration. No Gore-tex, no lightweight synthetics or molded footbeds. The sales guy relayed to me in a harsh whisper that they were the boots worn by the Swiss army mountain warfare battalions and that they were about to be discontinued so he would take $40 off the $265 price tag.

Put this story on pause for a minute. In 1996 $265.00 was just 10 bucks short of my monthly rent. Not my share of the rent. The whole fucking apartment. Imagine spending your monthly total rent on a pair of boots. Heavy man. Like an owl playing a xylophone made from dragon bones.

OK. Obviously, between the $40 discount and the story about them being issued by the Swiss Army, I bought the boots.

In the coming months learned to I love and hate them in equal measure. They were heavy. This is not hyperbole. I doubt that most people own a pair of shoes that weighs more than 3lbs for both shoes, combined. These motherfuckers were 4lbs. 7 oz. PER BOOT.

Also, being made from heavy duty full grain leather, they were a stiff and inflexible blister factory. I wore them everyday, all day out of necessity. Every evening I unlaced them and shucked my swollen, beat up feet from their hard, black shells. It was 5 months until they became comfortably formed to my feet or, more likely, my feet had formed to them.

I have a friend named Aaron. He taught me how to cut beef a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away and he had a story he loved to tell with great relish from a time when he was working the floor at a particularly rough and tumble slaughterhouse staffed by ex-cons. One day he was skinning a huge steer with a particularly grizzly old con when he accidentally slashed his partner's hand to the bone with his skinning knife. The gentleman looked at his hand, looked at Aaron and then, while stanching the bleeding with his mouth, said "Shiit Aaron! Looks like you and me are married now!"

That's how I felt after 5 months of blisters and bloody socks with my pair of big black anachronistic boots. We were married. I wore them most days for 5 years until the soles worn through and I was forced to send them off to get resoled. 3 months later they returned from Seattle with a new set of Vibram soles, cleaned and waxed, looking nearly brand new. In 2003 I moved to New York City and they became my default Winter boots. Through the snow, ice and salt of 12 Winters I abused them, took them for granted. The leather was scuffed and stained with white rings of sno-melt. The soles had worn nearly smooth and cracked. I hadn't seen or noticed them and they had suffered. When I sat down to clean and wax them a month before I moved to Vermont I was ashamed.

 A New Hope

You never know what something means until it's too late, it seems. After having my boots as a constant companion for 20 years I was coming to terms with the fact that they were not going to make it another 20. After cycling through anger, denial, etc. I decided to throw myself onto the mercy of the universe and set up an eBay alert for Raichle 11.5 boots and see what happened. What happened for two months was nothing. But one morning I awoke to see that not only had someone listed a pair of Raichle's in my size but even the same obscure model, of which there was almost no information on the internet. $130 flew from my paypal account and for a week I waited like a child for a box to plonk down on my front step.

When the day finally came I took the box and hid it in the closet. For days I could not bring myself to open it so contorted were my emotions with worry and disbelief. Obviously something would be wrong with them. They wouldn't fit. The leather would be dried out and crispy like an old saddle. On and on the spirals of neurosis went. When we're young we don't know what thing mean but we also don't worry them to death either. So it goes.

I cracked the box on a Saturday afternoon.

The boots were perfect. Someone had obviously worn them to the store, once, and promptly stuck them in the back of the closet never to be seen again. The only things missing were the wads of paper stuffed in the toes. I slid my feet in and carefully laced them up. The smooth white leather lining caressed my feet. Magic and bliss. Until I started walking around in them.

Holy SHIT those motherfuckers were stiff as a wedding night prick! The love/hate relationship had been made anew.

I'm now 3 months into breaking my new Eigers in. I wear them dutifully everyday, all day and I have the bruises, blisters and weird calluses to prove it. In the beginning I was afraid that maybe, because I'm now an old man, my feet wouldn't endure months of aching feet. Perhaps I had just gone irretrievably soft. Then there was my daily climb up the hill from town to my house now made 4x harder by the small boat anchors tied to my feet.

Maybe I would just die of a heart attack, thinking to myself "Is this how it ends?" as I sank dizzily to my knees, head thrumming with proud moments and regrets as everything faded to grey.

Well, good news all the way around!

One, I have not died and I am now, in point of fact, in much better shape because of those heavy bastards than I was even 5 or 6 years ago, well before I officially become a sooty old geezer. And two, while the boots aren't exactly like wearing bedroom slippers, they are almost comfortable and 2 full months ahead of schedule. Just in time for Spring here in Vermont and the miles of hiking trails just a few minutes from my front door. Oh, and those old boots? Well, as it turns out, I have found a shop that is willing to resole/restitch them, replace the nonexistent leather linings and fix the cracked and stained scree collars. Unfortunately, good work doesn't come cheap but, when I'm more flush with cash this Summer I'll send them away for a few months to be renewed while I get to know these Heavy Horses a little bit better.

For draft horses, everyday is Hump day.

Weekend Cider Update: Mistakes Were Made. Plus Saké!

Here's a one sentence update on my cider making project: It went good, then it went bad.

A few technical items before we get to the fuckery:

1) I added a 1/2 teaspoon of Pectin enzyme that helps make the cider less cloudy to the juice about 1 1/2 weeks in.

As a natural wine nerd I have nothing against cloudy drink but it became pretty apparent that, if left untreated, the final product was going to be downright murky. Not exactly what you want when you're trying to convince people that your weird homemade cider is not a horrible tasting neurotoxin. Plus, pectinase helps free up some extra sugar and thus a bit more alcohol, which is nice.

2) The fermentation took 3 weeks, about 1 week longer than I was planning. This is actually good because a long, cool fermentation produces less headache inducing elements than when it goes warm and fast.

3) The end result was nice. Not super apple-y but clean with a crisp, white wine mineral mouthfeel and finish. In all honesty, surprisingly good! I'm picking up 3 more gallons tomorrow when we head to the store.

What would I change? Well, I'd like to add a pound of sugar per gallon to get a bit more alcohol. the apples up here are well suited to good tasting cider, it turns out, but they don't have much sugar. I'd guess that my first attempt was around 3-4% where most cider is around a beer-like 5-6% and the lack of alcohol makes the mouthfeel slightly off compared to quality commercial dry ciders.

Johnny Appleseed, real estate speculator, gentrified eastern waterways by planting fucking apple trees.

So, what did I fuck up?

In the actual MAKING of the cider, nothing. It couldn't have gone better. I was fully expecting that I was going to end up with murky turd-water or a marginally drinkable cider that had more in common with kombucha than Crispin. Anyway, where I failed was in assuming that champagne style bottles took regular American-sized bottle caps. Spoiler alert: They Do Not. I found this out by tearing the glass lip off the top of my first bottle, completely grenading my heavy duty capper thingie and spraying my kitchen with shattered glass. It was a real donkey fuck and now I have blue painters tape over the top of all my bottles as I wait for my 29mm caps, new capper and 29mm capping bell to arrive. Lesson learned: do not assume anything when it comes to cheese eating Euro equipment. 

Anyhow, my first fermentation project, all technical issues aside, was a success which has won me enough proof-of-concept brownie points to order a big-assed brew bucket in which I plan on making a pilot batch of Nigori Saké with some organic sweet rice from the hippy bulk aisle, some Koji from the internet and the same champagne yeast I used for the cider.

Warning: Sake ahead.

 Don't worry, rice wine is much more complicated than cider making and there will be MANY more entertaining opportunities for me to completely dick it up along the way. Have a great weekend.

Things Worth Living For: Salt-fired German Beer Humpens

Here's a fluffy, Feel-Good, non-confrontational post to lull you into the weekend, it's about mugs.

I honestly can't remember how I ended up buying my first German beer stein. It might have been after going down a deep, dark rabbit hole about traditional European high salt fired ceramics. I do, after all, have a university degree in the ceramic arts. Not the tiddly-winks basket weaving kind of a degree, but rather one that involved, among other things, building kilns from dumpster scraps, welding, formulating experimental purpose specific clay bodies, mold building, slip casting and using the ashes of specific hardwood trees to replicate a 2000 year old Chinese glaze. An engineering/chemistry/materials science/playing-with-fire degree or a sort that I abandoned in the end to make giant color field paintings, but I digress.

Firstly, what makes these mugs interesting, to me anyway, is that the way they are made. They begin as a slug of grey clay that is then swaged into the distinctive sort of bullet shape inside a die with the help of a plunger being pressed in at many thousands of PSI. (Ironically, this is exactly how the copper jackets of rifle and pistol bullets are made so the bullet shape may not be a coincidence.) The newly formed mug body is then trimmed and cleaned up by hand using a metal tool like a lemon zester and a damp natural sponge. On the mug on the right you can actually see the remains of the sponge mark at the bottom in the center, which I find un-endingly charming.

Next they're taken to a room where they sit and dry out for a day or two (this step cannot be rushed and, in fact, should be as slow as possible to prevent the clay from cracking because of the differential between the density of mechanical water in the thicker base versus the thinner lip. If these forces become to extreme you will have a shearing effect that will form a nearly perfect circular stress-riser around the circumference of the mug and the top 3/4s of the mug will just pop off. This is avoided by slowing the drying process with high humidity and giving the clay time to equalize. A process not unlike the salt equilibrium period when you are curing prosciutto, jamon serrano or country hams. Looks like that degree paid off after all...)

After drying to "leather hard" they are taken to an actual human who forms and attaches the handle by hand. And I mean "by hand". See that handle shape? it was formed by squeezing and drawing a piece of clay between the inside of the thumb and the knuckle of the forefinger knuckle area of the palm of some German guy. It's literally the outline of his hand. Once the handle is drawn it is then attached by smooshing the clay of the handle into the clay of the mug. Again, check the top of the mug on the right. You can see the thumb marks! Again, very charming but also very functional as the portion of your hand, when gripping the mug, is exactly the same portion of hand used to form the handle!

Ergonomics, people! These things, despite being fairly heavy and full of a half liter of beer (that's a pint), feel weirdly light in the hand because of this thoughtful and ingenious process.

A vision of the future me

Lastly, the mugs are taken to a series of two kilns. One is the low temperature bisque firing that removes all the mechanical water (as opposed to the water that is bonded, chemically) from the clay, pretty boring, and the second is the high salt firing, where things get exciting.

So once the kiln reaches around Cone 9 (2300' f), the neighborhood where the various minerals in the clay begin to vitrify (or fuse together to form, essentially, artificial stone) there is a massive injection of rock salt mixed with a bit of water through ports in the sides of the kiln. Because of the high temperatures inside the kiln the salt explodes and atomizes, turning into a vapor that coats the mugs. Then something really interesting happens: everywhere the salt vapor touches, the clay becomes molten in a thin layer of the outside. Yeah, like fucking LAVA, molten. The salt acts as a Flux that chemically lowers the melting point of the surface of the clay. This forms the glaze, or glassy surface, of the mug making it suitable to put beer or in my case, herbal tea in. Without the glaze the stoneware would be porous allowing millions of little crevices for bacteria to hang out and be gross in, an undesirable trait in a beer stein.

Well, that's it, your Friday beer themed fluff post has been served. Have a great weekend.

Yes, they come in Liters too.

Aesthetics 1

Choose good things. Do not give your time, money or attention to things that are anti-aesthetic, artificial or anti-human. Let them wither and pass.

And so begins the beginning of my series that will investigate the thinking and works of Bill Mollison, Christopher Alexander, Jane Jacobs, James C. Scott among others and how they can help us see our way to a new appreciation and wonder of the world we live in: Where it's been and where it can go. I think you'll like it.