Results of Merguez Sausage trials and life....

Hi...

Its been a busy period for me... It's unfortunate but sometimes life interferes and doesn't allow you to do what you want, but you have to do what you need. A time of work interrupted my usual summer break (I teach therefore I am off during the summer) and at times am called in to do a few things. Enough said.



I took the four recipes that I referenced before and tried them, all at once. My family is used to the taste test routine around here. "Oh you think this is bad, you should have been here for the beurre blanc period!" is what my husband was saying. I was perfecting my technique on what is usually a difficult sauce and tried it, probably every night, for about a month. We were slithering around from all the butter we were ingesting, but I nailed it, and never broke it once at the restaurant because of it. Practice does make perfect, especially when it comes to sauce making.



I will break down the recipes I tried here:

1. The Gutsy gourmet recipe used lamb trim. I don't have a grinder at home - here's the meat grinder thing: I went to a restaurant supply store, the only one near me, and purchased one. I got it home and tried to assemble it and the handle wouldn't go onto the post which it needed to do to operate. I know I'm blonde, but I can assemble a simple meat grinder...the table clamp type. Anyway, I asked my husband to look at it too, and he said it was so cheaply made there were parts of metal from the dipping it took in lead paint in China where it was made that the points of metal stuck out so far you couldn't assemble the handle onto it without breaking it. Back to the store, and rethinking the meat to use.
So I purchased ground lamb only for all the recipes. This one also used curry powder, cinnamon, thyme, garlic (which I shaved with my microplane) and a few unusual ingredients - currants and pomegranate juice.



2. The recipes from both the Big Oven and Fooddownunder sites were identical so I only made the recipe once. It contained garlic, fresh cilantro and parsley, paprika (2 tbsp), ground cumin, coriander, cinnamon, cayenne pepper and salt and pepper. There was quite a bit of paprika and this made the sausage recipe very red. The recipe did call for lean ground lamb and pork or beef fat to be mixed in. As I said, since I didn't have a meat grinder I did use just ground lamb, but I can say I didn't think it was all that lean so I didn't feel adding extra fat was necessary.



3. The recipe from Food Network web site had a slightly different spicing blend too. It started with garlic and fresh cilantro as the others did, and had half the amount of paprika so it wasn't as red overall. There was also ground cumin and coriander but removed the cinnamon of the other and added allspice instead, and had the addition of red wine vinegar as well.



All three recipes were made into slider sized portions (I got 8 sliders from each 1.2-1.4 pounds of meat that came in the packages, and the recipes were adjusted from it originals so the original spicing proportions were maintained).



My family loved, surprising to me, the strongest spiced one of all. (This was the recipes from Big Oven and fooddownunder.com)
I felt the ones from Gusty Gourmet were light and sweet and very pleasant tasting, but not probably traditional to what I had been reading about these sausages. I feel regrinding the recipe through the meat grinder would grind up the currants a little and it would help the cohesiveness of it although I enjoyed the currants through the meat.
The recipes from Big Oven/fooddownunder.com were strongly flavored and spicy. Not hot, which can be adjusted by the amount of cayenne, but spicy. My husband's comment was it seemed the most authentically Middle Eastern of them all.
The recipe from the Food Network was not as spicy or strong, the blend seemed to allow the taste of the lamb to come through more. Our general consensus was the spicing seemed to remind us of the meat that comes in the gyro sandwiches (which is a ground meat product as well).

Overall, a good experience. I would make any of these again. Initially, since I ended up making 24, I froze half of them (four from each recipe). I wrapped them using Glad Press and Seal (making them sort of IQF - individually quick frozen), with the intention of transferring them to resealable plastic bags later. Truth be told, they never made it to the plastic bags, my family asked to have them again. (and actually - they don't really like lamb all that much)

Initially when the sausages were at room temperature, I used the instructions in the Big Oven recipe for cooking and timing. They were all nicely cooked, juicy and had a very light spicy crust outside. When I took them from the freezer, I used instructions that you would find on any IQF frozen meatball package, basically 350 degrees for about 20 min or until they are cooked through. (they went into the oven completely frozen). And again, they were nice and juicy but a tiny bit more cooked then when they were cooked from the defrosted state, but still had a slight bit of the spicy crust. Stove top cooking was definitely a better method.

Try these recipes, let me know what you think of them...

Now, looking for the next thing to try...