Saucisse de Toulouse

A coarse pork sausage with almost nothing in it but pork, salt and pepper, coiled rather than linked.

Pork. Not vegetarian — contains pork, sausage casings, which are gut unless it says otherwise.

Ingredients

• 1.6 kg pork shoulder, in cubes
• 400 g pork back fat, in cubes
• 30 g salt
• 2 teaspoons coarse black pepper
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• a pinch of grated nutmeg
• 100 ml dry white wine, very cold
• 3 m hog casings, soaked

Method

1. THERE IS ALMOST NOTHING IN IT, AND THAT IS THE POINT. Pork, salt, pepper, a little garlic and wine. No herbs, no spice mix, no rusk. A sausage this plain has nowhere to hide, so the meat and the grind are the whole thing -- which is also why it is the sausage a cassoulet wants, where a seasoned one would fight everything else in the pot.
2. COARSE GRIND, 8 MM, and the fat must stay in visible pieces. Finely minced it becomes a different and much smoother sausage. You should be able to see the fat in a cut face.
3. EVERYTHING COLD, INCLUDING THE MINCER PARTS, as with any sausage on this site. Blade, plate and bowl in the freezer an hour; meat and fat thirty minutes. Smeared fat gives a crumbly greasy sausage and nothing recovers it.
4. Casings soaked in warm water 1 hour and rinsed through.
5. Meat, fat and mincer parts chilled hard.
6. Pork and fat tossed with the salt, pepper, garlic and nutmeg, then back in the fridge 30 minutes.
7. Minced through a coarse 8 mm plate into a cold bowl.
8. The cold wine poured over and the mixture beaten 2 minutes only -- less than a merguez, because this one wants to stay loose and coarse rather than tightly bound.
9. A SMALL PATTY FRIED AND TASTED. Nothing can be adjusted once it is in the casing, and a plain sausage shows an under-seasoning immediately.
10. Casings filled loosely and NOT TWISTED INTO LINKS. This one is left as a single long coil, which is how it is sold and how it is cooked.
11. Pricked here and there with a pin to let air out.
12. Rested uncovered in the fridge 12 hours so the surface dries.
13. Cooked coiled in a pan over a medium heat, 15 to 20 minutes, turned once with two forks or a plate. Low and slow: high heat splits the skin and the fat runs out.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under France · All recipes