Merguez

A thin red lamb sausage with no pork fat in it, where the fat is lamb and must be kept cold throughout.

Lamb. Not vegetarian — contains lamb.

Ingredients

• 1.5 kg lamb shoulder, in cubes
• 500 g lamb fat, in cubes
• 4 tablespoons sweet paprika
• 2 tablespoons harissa
• 1 tablespoon ground cumin
• 1 tablespoon ground coriander
• 2 teaspoons cayenne
• 1 teaspoon ground fennel
• 6 cloves garlic, crushed
• 35 g salt
• 100 ml iced water
• 3 m narrow lamb casings, soaked

Method

1. LAMB FAT, NOT PORK FAT, and that is not a detail. Merguez is a lamb sausage throughout and the fat is what makes it one. Lamb fat has a higher melting point than pork, which is a mercy here: it holds together a little better. It also sets hard and waxy when cold, so these are eaten hot and are unpleasant at room temperature.
2. EVERYTHING COLD, INCLUDING THE MINCER PARTS, as with any sausage. Blade, plate and bowl in the freezer an hour; meat and fat thirty minutes. Smeared fat gives a crumbly greasy sausage and there is no recovering it.
3. NARROW CASINGS, and that is what makes it look like merguez. Lamb casings around 22 mm, not the hog casings used for a thick sausage. A fat merguez cooks wrong -- the whole design is a thin sausage that chars fast over a high heat.
4. Casings soaked in warm water 1 hour and rinsed through.
5. Meat, fat and mincer parts chilled hard.
6. Lamb and fat tossed with all the spices, garlic and salt, then back in the fridge 30 minutes.
7. Minced through a medium 6 mm plate into a cold bowl.
8. Iced water poured over and the mixture beaten hard 3 minutes until it is tacky and clings in strands. That is the protein binding and it is what stops the sausage crumbling.
9. A SMALL PATTY FRIED AND TASTED before anything goes in a casing. Nothing can be adjusted afterwards, and these want more salt and more heat than instinct suggests.
10. Casings filled WITHOUT packing tight, so they can be twisted without bursting. Air pockets pricked out.
11. Twisted into lengths of about 12 cm, alternating direction each time.
12. Rested uncovered in the fridge 12 hours so the surface dries and the colour deepens.
13. Grilled over a high heat or fried fast, 8 to 10 minutes, turning. They split if cooked slowly. Eaten hot, in bread, with harissa.

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 Morocco · All recipes