[Sca-cooks] OOP New Toy Acquisition, was, Re: What to do with 55 egg whites?

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Feb 7, 2009, at 9:58 PM, Carol Smith wrote:

>
> While Phil is waxing eloquent about his new Robot Coupe R2, I'm  
> going to mention my 5-lb Italian sausage press, which we used at a  
> workshop earlier today.  No, not the bangers, which Master A turned  
> out single-handedly using a very thin pipe on a kitchen aid,

Hey, they were lamb casings. Bangers can be made in larger-diameter  
hog casings, but often they're smaller. I suspect that your big piston- 
type stuffer gives one a somewhat finer degree of control over the  
filling process.

> but one very finely ground sausage, and Baron Alexandre's variant on  
> an Apicius recipe.

A very nice version of one of the Apicius Lucanian sausage.

>  I kind of tortured him; it's so easy to make sausage when you have  
> the proper equipment, and kitchen aid doesn't do it.  There's more  
> waste with the long tube on the press, but it's more than made up  
> for in the less time it takes to fill the casings.  And it's much  
> neater than the kitchen aid, too.

What I found a little distressing was the small hopper tray on the  
KitchenAid; not only did it hold a small amount of the filling, but if  
you used the plunger that comes with it to push the meat down into the  
opening, it just sort of pushed meat over the top edge of the hopper  
onto your work surface. It got to the point where about half the time  
I was just forming balls of meat the size of the pipe opening, and  
pushing them down with my hand. Which, of course, does slow down the  
process somewhat.

> To be fair, it doesn't grind the meat at all, let alone compare to  
> the Kitchen Aids.  On the other hand, in my opinion, that's what  
> butchers are for.  Just get the meat coarsely ground, add spices and  
> liquid, mix well, refigerate overnight, and you're ready to go.

In theory, I'd agree, but different grinds produce different products.  
For the fine-grained, almost pasty texture appropriate for the bangers  
I was making, well, I keep believing the books that say to put the  
meat twice through the grinder. In actual fact they lie, and that  
never really works. You've really got to grind it and then homogenize  
it in a food processor (or if you have time, maybe a really big  
mortar) for that sort of effect.

>  I just might suggest it to his wife, as a gift...
>
> BWAHAHA!

"But honey, I NEEEEEED a 5-lb sausage stuffer! Brekke said so!"

Adamantius






"Most men worry about their own bellies, and other people's souls,  
when we all ought to worry about our own souls, and other people's  
bellies."
			-- Rabbi Israel Salanter