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Making Andouille

4K views 9 replies 7 participants last post by  phatch 
#1 ·
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.
 
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#2 · (Edited)
Andouille is pretty hard to find outside of it's homeland in Louisiana.
I just almost spilled my coffee reading this. Andouille was not born in Louisiana, but in France!

Thank you for the incredibly detailed post with pretty pictures though, it's fascinating. Beautiful job on the FRENCH andouilles. /img/vbsmilies/smilies/tongue.gif The only andouilles I have had were made entirely out of pork tripes.
 
#4 · (Edited)
the word is french, but I don't think the sausage is. Ruhlman indicates that in France, andouille is any sausage cooked and served with beans. This sausage does show up in various versions of Louisiana bean dishes too, but the term is applied regionally to a specific sort of sausage garlicky, spicy smoked sausage.
 
#5 ·
I admit my ignorance on who is Ruhlman, but he is wrong... ;)

French andouille is a traditional sausage made exclusively with tripes (intestine, stomach, etc), and thus the name has no relation to what it is served with.

The Cajun andouille has been introduced by French-speaking immigrants... An educated guess is that it may have been introduced by Acadians, as many of these originally came from Northwestern France, the area where the andouille is commonly found. Again, this is just a guess...

The recipe seems to have changed substantially in the process though. I have never tasted the Cajun version, but Phatch's recipe looks very appetizing...
 
#7 ·
Phatch,

Terrific thread, thank you for sharing the technique and the pictures. I always thought that the flavor  profile was milder in France than the Cajun version ( Longer smoking ).

I guess it is up to the cook to decide.

Petals.
 
#9 ·
Great thread Phatch. One day I will make some sausage too! It's inspiring to see others doing it.

With regard to the curing salt.. if you don't smoke it.. how does the sausage end up as hard as it typically is? Is it kept in a dry area as typical ham curing is done? Is that what the smoking is for? Could you cold smoke it? Sorry for so many questions.. I probably need to buy the book! /img/vbsmilies/smilies/lol.gif
 
#10 ·
Ruhlman offers a cold-smoked version as well. Cold smoking is usually a more complex set up than hot smoking. Smoking can help preserve the foods, but in modern cooking is more of a flavoring process. KYHeirloomer could tell you more about that than I could.

Hard sausages have a longer curing time and become hard largely by losing water. You need temperature and humidity controls for air cured sausages and hams. There are instructions on the 'net for converting an old refrigerator into such an environment but I've not done it.

Curing salt does have some texture impacts. Bruce Aidells talks about that in his sausage book and I don't recall all the details much beyond what I alluded to in the first post, that it helps the meat bind some though that's not its primary function.

I need to buy copy of that book too.
 
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