Andouille is pretty hard to find outside of it's homeland in Louisiana. So I made some myself.
I'm using the recipe in Ruhlman and Polcyn's Charcuterie. I'll not be posting the exact recipe but you can find it there. Here's another recipe that's fairly standard and offers some technique tips I'd use next time.
Most recipes use 5 pounds of pork shoulder. I picked up a boneless pork shoulder which made the prep work easier.
Cut the meat in 1" cubes. Remove membranes and such as you find them but keep all the fat. Chill the meat down and keep it as cold as possible.
Mix up the seasonings. Lots of salt; some hot spices, some curing salt which is not essential, but this is traditionally a cured sausage; some sweet spices which are out of the ordinary compared to other recipes but really work nicely; thyme. You can omit the curing salt.
Chop some onion, mince some garlic and it's ready to go.
Combine all of that, cover it, and let it meld in the refrigerator for a day or two. Chill down your grinder, bowl, and acquire some hog casings.
I'm grinding with the KitchenAid attachment. It does the job but is finicky to feed. It's best to grind into a bowl set in ice to help keep everything COLD. This is one place I'd change from Ruhlman's technique. I'd grind on the large plate next time instead of the small. And I'd use the technique in that other link above to grind only half the meat and hand cut the other half to a 1/4 inch or so dice to give some extra texture to the Andouille.
When you have it ground, you beat it with the paddle in the mixer for a minute or two. This activates a protien in the meat to help the sausage bind to itself. Nitrates and Nitrites in the curing salt contribute to the binding action as well.
Fry off a bit to check for seasoning. I liked the flavors of the unsmoked andouille as it was. Correct the seasoning as needed and mix.
Chill the ground meat.
Clean the grinder and set it up for stuffing. In the case of the KitchenAid. you take out the blade and plate and insert a spacer and the stuffing tube. Feed the casings onto the tube, about 10 feet of casing.
Stuffing is easiest as a two person operation. One to feed the stuffer and the other to feed the casings and set the packing density. My 10 year old son is running the casings for me. If you're doing it alone, try to set up the stuffer so it feeds out onto a surface as close to the same height as you can manage.
In the past, I've knotted the end of the casing and stuffed against that. This time, I left a few inches of casing free so I could adjust the pack and twist the sausages off more easily, letting the filling slide a bit to adjust as needed. I found this latter technique easier.
As the stuffer, you need to minimize introduced air pockets in the sausage. The KitchenAid is poor this way.
Twist into links. You want to alternate the direction of the twists at each end of each link. That's a much more stable twist than all the same way.
Set up your smoker and smoke for a couple of hours. I used Hickory, but Pecan would be good. Ruhlman recommends a finish temp of 150, probably relying on the sausage being cooked a second time, and the curing salt for safety. I smoked to 160, just for my own standards of safety.
Even unsmoked, the sausage was quite nice. The smoking changes the flavors, mellowing and melding the flavors different from the taste check. Worth making even without a smoker. Or if you added some liquid smoke or smoke powder that would be all right too.
I'm using the recipe in Ruhlman and Polcyn's Charcuterie. I'll not be posting the exact recipe but you can find it there. Here's another recipe that's fairly standard and offers some technique tips I'd use next time.
Most recipes use 5 pounds of pork shoulder. I picked up a boneless pork shoulder which made the prep work easier.
Cut the meat in 1" cubes. Remove membranes and such as you find them but keep all the fat. Chill the meat down and keep it as cold as possible.
Mix up the seasonings. Lots of salt; some hot spices, some curing salt which is not essential, but this is traditionally a cured sausage; some sweet spices which are out of the ordinary compared to other recipes but really work nicely; thyme. You can omit the curing salt.
Chop some onion, mince some garlic and it's ready to go.
Combine all of that, cover it, and let it meld in the refrigerator for a day or two. Chill down your grinder, bowl, and acquire some hog casings.
I'm grinding with the KitchenAid attachment. It does the job but is finicky to feed. It's best to grind into a bowl set in ice to help keep everything COLD. This is one place I'd change from Ruhlman's technique. I'd grind on the large plate next time instead of the small. And I'd use the technique in that other link above to grind only half the meat and hand cut the other half to a 1/4 inch or so dice to give some extra texture to the Andouille.
When you have it ground, you beat it with the paddle in the mixer for a minute or two. This activates a protien in the meat to help the sausage bind to itself. Nitrates and Nitrites in the curing salt contribute to the binding action as well.
Fry off a bit to check for seasoning. I liked the flavors of the unsmoked andouille as it was. Correct the seasoning as needed and mix.
Chill the ground meat.
Clean the grinder and set it up for stuffing. In the case of the KitchenAid. you take out the blade and plate and insert a spacer and the stuffing tube. Feed the casings onto the tube, about 10 feet of casing.
Stuffing is easiest as a two person operation. One to feed the stuffer and the other to feed the casings and set the packing density. My 10 year old son is running the casings for me. If you're doing it alone, try to set up the stuffer so it feeds out onto a surface as close to the same height as you can manage.
In the past, I've knotted the end of the casing and stuffed against that. This time, I left a few inches of casing free so I could adjust the pack and twist the sausages off more easily, letting the filling slide a bit to adjust as needed. I found this latter technique easier.
As the stuffer, you need to minimize introduced air pockets in the sausage. The KitchenAid is poor this way.
Twist into links. You want to alternate the direction of the twists at each end of each link. That's a much more stable twist than all the same way.
Set up your smoker and smoke for a couple of hours. I used Hickory, but Pecan would be good. Ruhlman recommends a finish temp of 150, probably relying on the sausage being cooked a second time, and the curing salt for safety. I smoked to 160, just for my own standards of safety.
Even unsmoked, the sausage was quite nice. The smoking changes the flavors, mellowing and melding the flavors different from the taste check. Worth making even without a smoker. Or if you added some liquid smoke or smoke powder that would be all right too.