Sausage + Fest = Charcuterie

We have piled up the protein bounties of the canyons, waterways, forests, prairies, and mountains in our freezers over the last several years.  Packages of neck roast, duck breast, and shank meat have been knocked aside in our search for that last package of backstrap during grilling season, literally falling through the cracks and drifting towards the bottom of a disorganized heap of wild nutrients.  If each of these packages of meat had a consciousness, they would wonder what they had done wrong such that they wouldn't fulfill their preconceived notion of a destiny - pot roast, kabobs, osso buco.  Little do they know they are destined for perhaps the most exotic and refined of all meat preparations... SAUSAGE FEST!!!!

Perhaps it isn't surprising to other people that the sex ratio of sausage festivities tends to be skewed towards males, but I ask... why is this?  Is it hour after hour of up-to-your-elbows stirring of ground meat and fat?  Is it the over consumption of heavily salted and seasoned meats, to "make sure the recipe is right?"  The guzzling of craft beer resulting in belching and flatulence to go with bad breath caused by the extra garlic in the test kielbasa?  I know there are women who enjoy this kind of shenanigan (I have created charcuterie with the fairer sex before), but the double entendre of sausage party is right at home here.

The Dude Squad is hard at work

At sausage parties, there is always some dude who knows everything about how to make sausage, and any deviation from the proper way to stuff a bratwurst or spice a big Italian is cause for debate.  Really, everybody at the party has a little bit of that dude in him.  Everybody wants to put up a good product.  It is a high risk, high reward situation.  Spices, pork, pork fat, casings, and those precious (but oft-neglected) packages of meat are valuable commodities.  Don't over-do that salt!  The coriander seeds are supposed to be toasted not burnt!  It makes for some pretty lively banter; you get the picture.

BJB getting the spice mixture just right

For me, SausageFest 2013 went down at my boss' house (his wife is most gracious), with several of my colleagues in attendance.  We figure, as a group, we ground, mixed, spiced, and stuffed about 150 pounds of sausage.  I think my buddies were a little concerned at first about the mix in my meat.  You know it... coot, goldeneye, bufflehead, antelope, mule deer, whitetail deer, elk (maybe even some mystery meat)... they all went into the grinder together.  If a good mix of apple varieties makes for a great apple cider, the same logic should apply to sausage... right?  I make it sound lots more exotic than it really was... mostly it was mule deer, and I mixed it with a fair portion of pork butt roast to bring up the fat content to a level acceptable of a sausage.  I bet coot breast made up less than 1% of the meat, by volume.  Still, there is a little bite of a lot of adventures in each link.

Can you count how many tasty animals are in this sausage meat?

I made each of my recipes - sweet Italian, kielbasa, and ginger-sage breakfast sausage - using Michael Ruhlman's and Brian Polcyn's fantastic book Charcuterie: the craft of salting, smoking, and curing (W.W. Norton & Company, New York).  The guys I know back in Helena that are into this kind of thing call Charcuterie "The Bible."  This book is a blast, and I have enjoyed several of the recipies in the sausage section and especially in the chapter on pâtés and terrines.  I have never been afraid to substitute wild game for the major portion of pork in their recipies, and I have never been disappointed.  That said, my fellow sausage designers made wonderful recipes this weekend from tattered old books, pages printed from the internet, etc, proving you don't necessarily need "The Bible" to create a great sausage.

Sausage Fest is an important event in the year.  It continues an important tradition of using every last scrap of an animal harvested for food.  It brings people (granted, usually men) together for the sharing of stories, good beer, and enthusiasm for a satisfying job well done.  Most importantly, it gives us an opportunity to do something truly creative, to create culinary art.  Sausages may often be a lowly peasant food, but there is certainly some magic when salt, spice, fat, and meat come together in that neat little cylindrical package.

For now, the fresh sausage is wonderful.  The freezer will nuke many of the good spices and flavors over time, but even the lowliest of sausages... the one that also found its way to the bottom of the freezer... will find a home in a hearty wintertime chili or soup somewhere down the road.  The destiny of the diminutive package of shank will finally be fulfilled.