Holiday - This is a holiday favorite
This is a Russian Easter favorite. We've used pork butt, which is best, and pork shoulder which works well. The trick is lots of garlic and coarse grinding. In truth, we tediously chop the pork rather than grinding it at all.
Russian Sausage
Russian Sausage
Ingredients
- 3 1/2 to 4 lbs pork butt
- 12 feet of hog casing (lamb casing will do) - you probably do not need
quite this much but it sometimes splits and extra is needed
- 2 medium heads of garlic, broken into cloves and peeled
- 2 tsp carroway seeds
- 1 - 2 tsp ground black pepper
- 1 - 2 tsp salt
Instructions
- You want the meat coarsely ground or chopped. Use the pulse setting on
your food processor and make it up in small batches. I actually cut it up
into little chunks and chop it with a knife. It really isn't as good if you
use a meat grinder or set your food processor on liquefy.
- You want the garlic crushed. You can do this with a crusher, or you can
take a fist sized chunk of the pork, cut it into chunks and put it in your
food processor, set to liquefy. It is OK to have some small percentage of
the meat ground finely, just as long as most of it is chunky.
- Add the carroway seeds, and perhaps 1 tsp each salt and pepper to the meat
and garlic and mix it up well.
- Make a test patty. Cook it in a frying pan. Does it need more garlic? Does
it need more salt or pepper? Now is the time to tweak it.
- Now, stuff the casings. I use a sausage funnel and just take the meat and
shove it. Others, more fastidious have a more refined approaches. I tie it
off into fairly long links, each about a foot or so long.
- Preheat the oven to 350. Put the sausage into pyrex baking dishes. Prick
it with a fork or toothpick.
- Bake about 30 to 45 minutes, until it is nicely browned and cooked
through. Cooking it a bit longer does not hurt it.
The sausage freezes well and can be reheated whenever you want it. For best
results, it should be cooled at least overnight, so that the flavors can
really marry.