This is a text transcript of Episode 139 of the podcast “Master of None- Adventures in a Hands-on Life.” As such, it may not reflect the speakers’ words with 100% accuracy.
Some friends of ours raise hogs, and that’s actually where we get all of our pork. So, they have their ranch and they have a livestock hog operation where they raise hogs. They breed sows and those sows have pigs, and they raise those pigs up to slaughter weight, sell them, and that’s actually where we get all of our pork. So it’s really awesome meat coming from that farm raised situation versus a big industrial feed lot.
Anyway, what we end up doing, we buy the hogs live from them, they drop them off at the butcher, then we contact the butcher and put in our cut sheet, which outlines how we want all of that meat processed. What do we want cut into chops or sausage, cured hams, cured smoked bacon or pork belly. And then one of the options on there is some things that most people don’t normally find in their grocery store, but things that every hog has. So a lot of people are intimidated by cooking some of these less common cuts of meat- heart, liver, jowels, tongue, kidneys. So not being one to waste anything, I always have the butcher pack all of those cuts, those organ meats and odd cuts. Sometimes it’s really fun to explore new ways to cook those and prepare those.
So anyway, what I had was the livers from our last two hogs sitting in the freezer. Now, I’m going to be honest with you. I know, yeah, I know how healthy liver is to eat. I am not a big fan of eating liver. Just like straight, chopped, liver and onions, even fried liver. I’m really just not a fan of it. So I was trying to think, what can I do with these two hog livers that I have? And then I remembered that there’s one of my favorite things, which is actually made from hog liver. And that is boudin, which is a traditional Cajun sausage.
So what are we doing with hog liver? We are making a big batch of boudin. And I have two whole livers, so it’s going to make a pretty good sized batch. So what makes boudin boudin versus any other sausage. I’ve found there are some different schools of thought about boudin. Some people are going to tell you that it absolutely has to have whatever. Fill in the blank. People at the other end of the spectrum are going to say boudin is like a leftover regrigerator clean-out kind of sausage. Whatever you have, you can kinda grind it up and put it in and call it boudin. And like I said, everybody makes this a little differently, so there are a lot of regional variations on boudin and there are family variations, and some people are very strongly opinionated about the right way to make it and anything else isn’t true boudin. I’m going to go with a little more lenient approach for myself since nobody in my family taught me how to make it. We don’t have some family recipe for exactly how it has to be made.
Let’s talk about what it actually is and what makes it unique compared to some other sausages. First of all, I would say that traditional boudin is made with pork meat, pork liver, and rice. Those are key ingredients. It pretty much has to have rice. Now you might see cauliflower boudin also where someone steams cauliflower as a substitute for rice if you’re trying to do like a keto friendly version of boudin. That’s ok I guess, but I’m going with rice. It’s easier, but maybe not as healthy. Whatever. What I’m really trying to do though, is use up the pork liver. So we’re going to have some pork meat in there, some pork liver, and rice. That’s our start.
Now usually it’s going to have a lot of vegetables also, which is a very unique thing for sausage. When you think of sausage, you don’t usually think of vegetables. Being a Cajun sausage, you’re going to start with what’s called the Holy Trinity of Cajun cooking. That being onion, bell pepper, and celery. So if you’re starting with those ingredients- pork meat, pork liver, rice, celery, onions, and bell peppers, we really haven’t strayed at all from what somebody would identify as totally authentic traditional boudin. Another ingredient that I really like in mine that I would say is still not straying from that traditional dish is if you add some green onions. And I actually like to add them raw right at the end before I stuff it into links. So this is also a linked sausage. And then you have that fresh green onion mixed in there. So it’s diced up really fine and mixed in with the ground meat.
Now, in addition to those things, boudin is usually also going to have garlic. You can go pretty heavy on the garlic if you like garlic, which I do. So I’m going heavy on the garlic. Herbs, spices to taste. You could use a Cajun seasoning mix here if you wanted to. You could make your own Cajun seasoning mix. We’ll probably talk about that later. You could add whatever spices you’re in the mood for and the finished product can range from very mild to very spicy.
Now, another unique thing that makes boudin boudin is that all of the ingredients get cooked, then ground, then stuffed. So a lot of sausages you take raw meat, grind that raw meat, and stuff that into links, and then cook it. Whether that’s smoking it, boiling it, whatever. It gets cooked after it’s stuffed. The boudin gets cooked before you stuff it. And then actually, we poach it afterward, but we’ll get to that later.
One of the really unique things about boudin is how you eat it. Because of this, when you stuff it into those links, it’s not like a European or german style sausage where that meat is stuffed really tightly into that casing and it really just plumps up. Boudin is stuffed relatively loose as sausage-stuffing goes. The reason is when you eat it, the way that you eat it… Sidenote- really makes boudin an awesome delivery system for hot sauce, if you’re into hot sauce, which I am. It really turns that whole sausage into a meat popsicle where you can squeeze it up from the bottom and you can either squeeze it out onto a cracker and put some hot sauce or mustard or whatever you like on it. Or you can squeeze it straight into your mouth, put a little more hot sauce on it, squeeze, bite, hot sauce, squeeze bite, and so on. So if you like hot sauce, some good boudin is a great way to consume massive amounts of hot sauce.
Anyway, that’s kind of the standard for boudin. Ingredients, real traditional, is going to be that pork meat, pork liver, rice, vegetables, starting with that holy trinity of vegetables. And I should mention those vegetables, the celery, onions, and bell pepper; those all get chopped up, cooked, and then they also get run through the grinder with that meat. Fresh green onions going in raw, and then whatever garlic, herbs, spices you want to make it mild or spicy. Whatever flavor profile you’re looking for. Then we can kinda go from there and expand out with variations.
So some more common variations of boudin would be to either add or replace some of the meat. We might not have any pork in it. We might use one of these other meats entirely, or we might just add a little bit of one of these other meats. That might include crawfish, shrimp, any sort of other shellfish, gator, or chicken. Those are all fairly common variations on boudin. You can either add or replace the meat entirely with one of those ingredients. We don’t have any of those on hand. I could probably buy most of these if I really wanted to, but I don’t have any of those on hand right now. So we’re sticking with that simpler, more traditional version of pork boudin. Partly because I really want to use up the pork liver, and this is a really great way to do it, and I actually enjoy eating pork liver this way.
So one thing that people might do if they’re adding crawfish or shrimp, instead of actually grinding those, like you would grind meat, you might just dice it up and mix it in with the rest of the meat. So you’ll have little chunks of crawfish tail, shrimp tail, other shellfish.
You can absolutely make this out of any sort of wild game that you have- venison, rabbit, squirrel, any sort of game bird, ducks. You can do the same thing. And it’s basically going to be the same process for any of those meats that you’re using as the meat base for your boudin.
So I would say no matter what else you do or don’t do, just make sure that you have some sort of meat, some fat. I actually added some pork fat to mine because the liver is pretty lean and the pork meat that I was using is pretty lean too. So I just added a little bit of pork fat to the mix. So you need some meat, you need some intentional fat added, you need that rice or cauliflower, and your vegetables. If you have all of those, you can probably call it boudin.
So I really just don’t like liver on it’s own, but I do like the way that liver adds to ground meat or sausage. So even if I get a deer or an antelope or something like that, I don’t particularly care for its liver either on its own. But that’s a huge chunk of edible meat there that’s just packed with all sorts of nutrients and vitamins that are really good for you. So it’s just wasteful to throw that out. So what I like to do, even on those… When I’m making my ground meat from everything that I’m not going to leave as a roast or something like that, I just chop that liver up and grind it right in with that ground meat. You never notice that different flavor or texture from the liver added to it. I really think that it actually improves the quality, flavor, and texture of the ground meat when I add that liver into it.
So sausage, or even just ground meat, can really be a great way to start making some of those organ meats more approachable. Whether that’s liver, heart, kidneys, gizzard on birds, tongue, testicles, weird fat deposits, caul fat. I mentioned caul fat. Caul fat is this web of fat that goes around the internal organs. If you’re careful, you can remove this sheet of fat that’s in a spider-webby shape. You can make some really cool dishes by wrapping that around the meat and cooking it inside that mesh of caul fat. Now with deer and antelope, especially in the fall, fat gets deposited in certain spots in their body. Pretty much in all deer and in pronghorn also, that’s a very waxy fat. It’s not that squishy fat that cooks up and browns really nice in a skillet and adds to the flavor and texture and total experience of eating a steak when you have that crispy browned fat on it. No, no, deer fat isn’t like that. Deer fat is more like eating a candle. So I know that there’s some sort of numerical scale out there. I should look this up, but it gauges the hardness, the waxiness of fat. So different fats are more useful for different things. Deer fat, I actually use it for making those little suet bird feeders, where you have the birdseed embedded in it. The fat is so hard, after I render it, that the birds have to really work to pick those little seeds out of it. They end up making less of a mess, they don’t drop as much, and they have to work for it a little bit.
Anyway, we were talking about using some of those less commonly used parts of an animal. You might call it organ meat or whatever. Personally, heart and tongue, I think are awesome cooked on their own. Some of these others are really just packed with all sorts of nutrients, but it might be a little bit of a stretch for some people to get over the shape or texture of those other organ meats. You can always just grind them up and include them in your sausage and nobody will notice. Even you. You won’t even notice. And maybe I’m the person I’m trying to hide it from, so that works out just great.
Ok, next thing on my list for boudin. Curing. Curing is optional, and by curing I mean literally just adding some curing salt to whatever spice mix you’re using. That’s actually how I do it. If I want to add some curing salt to the meat when I mix my spice mix, I’m actually just going to take whatever salt, spices, and herbs, mix them together, add the total amount of curing salt that I want for the meat, mix it really well, and then mix that into the meat. Doing it that way spreads it out really well and it just helps avoid the possibility of having a hot spot where there’s a little too much that didn’t get mixed in quite well enough, and then another spot that didn’t get enough. So curing is optional. It’s going to do a couple things. It’s going to tend to make your boudin have a little more reddish pink color instead of a gray color. So maybe that’s appealing to you. And it’s also going to help it keep a little longer.
Boudin isn’t known for keeping really well. I would say, after you make your batch of boudin, probably plan on eating it within the first two or three days. Anything that you’re not going to eat in that first two or three days, just go ahead and freeze it. It does freeze pretty well. And then you can always just thaw it out, warm it back up, and have it later. So I actually like to use my vacuum sealer. I use my vacuum sealer all the time. So if I have a big batch of linked sausage. Let’s face it, it’s a lot less work to make it in big batches. The big batch itself is going to be more work than a small batch, but I would rather do one twenty pound batch of sausage and be done with it, do all my cleanup, clean my sausage stuffer, clean my grinder, and just be done. Versus doing four five-pound batches or ten two-pound batches. It’s a lot less work to do a big batch, so do that, put it into links, put them in the vacuum bags, vacuum seal them, throw it in the freezer for later.
Ok, let’s talk about the recipe or ratios that I used. A lot of this, especially when it comes to things like how much celery to add, how much bell pepper to add, how much diced onion to add, I was honestly just kind of eyeballing it. And when I make it next time, it might change. Anyway, I did kinda shoot for about a two to one ratio of pork meat to pork liver. So for every one pound of pork liver, I was using two pounds of pork meat. And you definitely have options. There’s no wrong way to do this. You have options for what kind of pork meat you use. You could take a pork shoulder, braise it or slow cook it, do the pulled pork thing and then chop that up. I did mention that everything gets ground. You have the option to either grind it, or you can just chop it really fine with a knife. I have a meat grinder, so being a little lazy, I just put everything through the grinder. We’re going to talk more about the grinder later, but if you do opt to use a grinder, I would recommend using your coarsest grinding plate on all of the ingredients that you’re putting through the grinder.
Anyway, a two to one ratio of pork meat to pork liver. I had about two pounds of pork liver. I had two livers, and they were each about a pound. So four pounds of pork meat is what I was shooting for. I opted for ground pork because when we had those hogs processed, we had certain cuts set aside as hams or chops or hocks or roasts of different types or whatever. Then a lot of the other stuff we had ground. So we had a bunch of little one pound packages of ground pork meat, which is absolutely delicious, but that’s what I chose to use for the actual pork meat. So it’s already been ground once. Here’s about what I added. About two cups of diced green onions. Some of these things have amounts that I wrote down, some don’t because a lot of these amounts are just based on the mood you’re in or what you have available. I’m working with about six pounds of meat, and I added about two cups of chopped green onion. I added some cilantro. I didn’t have any fresh cilantro in the fridge, but I did have the magical tubes of cilantro paste, so I put a good generous squirt of cilantro paste in there. I probably used six or eight tablespoons of minced garlic. I wasn’t really in the mood to chop or mince my own garlic. So again I used one of those magical things, the big jar of minced garlic. If you’re just making sausage where everything is getting mixed and ground, those big jars of mince garlic are awesome for adding garlic to those. So quite a bit of that garlic.
And then I made a Cajun spice mix. I’m actually going to tell you the ratios that I use on my Cajun spice mix so that if you want to write it down, you can. It’s actually pretty simple. So I used… and you can just gauge how much of this you put in to make it spicier or less spicy. I was actually going for something pretty mild because I’m slowly training my kids to like spicy food. So every time I make something, I try to make it just a little bit spicier to push their limits a little bit. Anyway if you go with four teaspoons, two teaspoons cayenne pepper, one teaspoon black pepper, one teaspoon red pepper flakes, and one teaspoon of paprika, that’s how I make my Cajun spice mix. So it’s actually a really simple spice mix. And then I think I doubled that for the amount of meat that I was working with. And that’s all that I used. And then I did use pretty generous amounts of that celery, bell pepper, and diced onion.
Cook your liver however you like. You could boil it whole and then chop it up and then run it through the grinder. What I actually did is sliced it into thin slices to have long thing pieces, browned those in a skillet, then ran them through the grinder. I find that those long thin pieces just grind really well. I can drop them down the feeder tube and they get grabbed by the auger and it works really well. So that’s what I did.
I browned all of the ground meat too. I think I’ve talked about this before. In case I haven’t, a little trick with browning meat if you’re doing tacos or anything else with browned ground meat. Sausage gravy, tacos, chili, anything that you’re browning ground meat for. Take your meat, put it in a hot skillet. If it’s pretty fatty, you don’t really need to add any oil, or you can add some pork fat, bacon grease, some butter to it if it’s lean so it doesn’t burn and stick to your skillet. But take your ground meat in one patty. When I process my own meat, I freeze it in vacuum bags, and I flatten it out. So when I thaw it, it thaws faster because it’s then. Then I basically have a square patty of meat that’s maybe six by six inches and three quarters of an inch to an inch thick when I thaw out the vacuum bag. It’s a really convenient way. If you have a tube or ball though, just go ahead and squish it flat so that you have one thin patty in that skillet. And you’re going to really cook it on one side. Just absolutely sear it where you think it’s on the verge of burning. Where it’s really turning brown and caramelizing, getting crispy on that one side. Then take that whole thing- or if you have a big patty, cut it into quarters. Flip all of those over, and do the same thing to the other side. Think like you’re cooking a burger on the grill. Burn that other side. Now at this point, you’ve really burned it on both sides, and that cooking action is starting to work its way into the middle. At that point, that’s when you start to chop it up. What a lot of people do is to throw the meat in the skillet and immediately start to chop it up and stir it around. That works, it’s fine, but if you use this method of searing it really well on one side, flipping it, searing it really well on the other side, and then starting the chopping, you really get that grilled burger flavor out of your ground meat. So there’s just a little tip. So that’s what I did for the ground pork.
I added that, basically added everything except for the rice, we haven’t talked about rice yet… I added everything except the rice and green onions to the mixture, mixed it all together. So basically what I have now is a big bowl with browned slices of liver, browned ground meat, and my vegetables- celery onions and bell peppers also all cooked in the skillet for a while. You know how they start to turn clear. Basically once they start to turn clear is when I pull them out. So all of that stuff is in a big bowl on my counter. It’s ready to run through the meat grinder. So that’s exactly what you’re going to do next. You’re going to run all of that through the meat grinder, catch it in another bowl, and just mix it up really well so that you have an even mix of all of those vegetables and meat and stuff.
So at this point I have six pounds of meat, a lot of vegetables, so I’m probably working with an eight pound batch. I also like to add some of my cooking liquid. Actually, I remember what I added. I was trying to think where I got cooking liquid this time because there wasn’t that much liquid left in the skillet after I browned the meat. I did add the little bit that was left back into the mix to get all that browned meat, browned butter, greasy flavor. But I remembered I had a batch of chicken broth going because I was getting ready to make soup, so I just took about two or three cups of that chicken broth, added that into the mix too. Just to get everything moving a little better and help it run through the sausage stuffer better.
Now a really important ingredient when we’re talking about boudin is the rice. So I cooked up a batch of rice. And I added to this six pound batch, I added maybe 5 cups of cooked rice. Be careful on a recipe that calls for a certain amount of rice, whether that’s before or after it’s cooked, just because there is a big difference. So I’m talking after I cooked the rice, I added about five cups of cooked rice to this mix and mixed it in really well too.
Now because I added some of that curing salt to the mix, I wanted to give it a chance to do its work. So I took this whole bowl with the rice and meat and vegetables and all of that and the spices and salt and curing salt all mixed together. I covered it and set it in the fridge overnight, just to give the curing salt a little bit of time to do its work on the meat. So the next morning, I pull it out of the fridge, I had about two cups of chopped green onions. When I do green onions, I like to chop the whole thing, so the white part and the green part. I don’t just do the green part of the green onion, I just chop up the whole thing, chop it up really fine. I mix that in too.
At this point, it’s ready to stuff into links. So let’s talk a little bit about sausage casing, sausage links, and the sausage stuffer. Sausage casing options. I actually went with a natural hog casing. I figured hog casing was fitting since we’re using hog meat, hog liver. I figured we’d just go ahead and use hog casing. And I already had some sitting around. What about natural versus synthetic casing? Now when I first started making sausage, I used synthetic casing because I did a bunch of reading, like I do about most of the things that I try, and I opted for synthetic because everyone said it’s easier to use. It’s not. Take my word for it. If you’re getting into making sausage, I would recommend going straight to the natural casings. So those are the casings that are actually made from animal intestines. Don’t let that gross you out. They’ve been cleaned. That’s what you eat when you eat a bratwurst or something. That outer skin that gives you that nice snap when you bite through it, that’s the intestine of an animal. So in my experience, those natural casings are actually a lot easier to use when you’re making sausage.
How do we use those? They come in a bag, they’ve been cleaned inside and out, they’ve been salted, and they’re actually really affordable. You can buy a bag fairly cheap, and if I laid them all end to end, in one bag of these hog casings, there’s probably 200 feet of hog intestine in this one little bag. Now they shrink up when they make them before they sell them, so you have to pull them out one by one. They’re usually in lengths of 4-5 feet most of the time. What I like to do is to rinse them really well in some warm water. Not that there’s anything gross on them. That’s just the recommendation is to rinse them really well. So I swish them around in a bowl of warm water to rinse the outsides off really well. I do a couple water changes. Then I just turn my sink on with just a little trickle of warm water coming out of the sink and I’ll grab one end of that casing and open it up. It’s a long tube, and I’ll just let that water flow through the casing. And that’s going to inflate the casing from something that was all shrunk up to its full size that it will be when it’s a filled sausage. Just let that water flow through the inside of the casing, flush it out really well. It really doesn’t’ take a lot of effort. And I find that getting them warm in that warm water kind of helps them get their elasticity. So that as you’re stuffing them you’re a lot less likely to have a blow-out and rupture the side of the casing as you’re using your sausage stuffer. That’s just the way I do it, I’m sure the professionals have some other opinions. So for this one I think I pulled out four lengths of the casing. Out of this bag, they were each about five feet long, so we’re talking about a total of 20 feet of casing to stuff my batch of boudin into.
I think by the time I added the vegetables, chicken broth, and the rice, I think that my total batch was around 12-14 pounds, so it ended up being a pretty good sized batch. Actually hold on for a minute, I’m going to walk over there to the shelf. I’m going to grab my sausage stuffer, and we’re going to get it out and talk about sausage stuffers. What I have, what I use, and maybe some other options. So, stand by.
Ok, I went and got my sausage stuffer. So if you’re shopping around for a sausage stuffer, you’re probably going to find a few different options. You’re going to see some that have a lever handle where you just push really hard on this lever, and it squeezes that ground meat mix out through a tube into a sausage casing. My recommendation, even though those may be cheaper, is to just stay away from those. I feel like they just don’t give you the mechanical advantage that you need to make your sausage making process easy and enjoyable. You’re also going to see sausage stuffers that have an electric motor that drives them. Now that’s kind of the extreme opposite end of the spectrum. Unless you are actually running a butcher shop where you’re producing massive amounts of sausage every day, I would stay away from those too. I like mine. It’s a five pound capacity, so even for this batch I had to run it through two and a half times to run all the boudin mix through the stuffer. It has a manual handle crank. So you crank this handle nice and slow, and it’s geared way down. It has the handle, and it’s attached to a couple gears, and this worm drive shaft that goes down into the middle of the container that you put your meat in. Hang on, let me get some of these parts out… then there’s what’s called a plunger, which is this piece that goes on top of the meat, fills that container, and has a rubber gasket around it. So it actually seals and has a little air release valve. So if you’re pushing it down and there’s any air inside, it lets that out and then seals when you get right next to the meat. So the meat doesn’t squeeze out through the air release. It’s pretty slick. Anyway, that pushes down, and you have this handle, so you can crank really slowly. If you’re an amateur sausage maker like myself, I still consider myself an amateur at this even though I’ve been doing it for years and years. Anyway, if I start one of those electric motor ones, I can hardly keep up with how fast it’s just squirting meat out into the sausage casing. So I prefer a hand crank because it’s so easy to just slow down or stop. And it’s plenty fast for my needs.
What else do we have on here? The canister has a five pound capacity. It’s all stainless steel, and it sits in this little stainless steel frame. It comes with these clamps so I can either clamp it to my countertop, which is what I currently do. Or if I ever have a spot that’s permanently devoted to sausage making and meat processing, it actually has bolt holes in that frame too. So you could actually bolt it down to a butcher block countertop if you wanted to. So the canister itself has a hole coming out of the side down at the bottom. And that’s actually threaded so I can take any of these little stuffing tubes. It actually comes with three different sizes, conveniently. I can put those right on there and then thread this little nut onto there to hold the stuffing tube in place. So as I crank that handle down that plunger goes down on the canister, squeezes that meat mix down, and it goes through the hole, through the tube, right into the sausage casing. And I can twist off my links as it comes out. You can also do this with two people. You can have one person cranking and the other person twisting off the links.
A little tip- whether you’re using natural casing or synthetic casing, when you’re twisting off your links. Let’s say that you want four six or eight inch links, or whatever length you want your sausage links to be. You basically just twist them off and spin them. You pinch it off and spin it like you’re making a balloon animal. Maybe that’s a bad example. Anyway, that’s how you make those individual links. When you’re doing that, you want to alternate directions. So you do one away from yourself, one toward yourself, one away from yourself, one toward yourself. If you don’t do that, then when you do subsequent links, you’re actually undoing the twisting on the links you did before. So alternate toward, away, toward, away. Just a little tip.
So what I actually do. I’m holding these stuffing tubes in my hand, let me pull one out. So after I have that sausage casing all rinsed, warmed, and ready to go, I’m actually going to take it from one end, slide it over this tube, all the way down to the base. Then I’m going to start sliding that whole thing on and packing it around this tube. Until the entire five feet of that casing is packed around this short, 6 inch long tube. And then I’m going to just pinch the end of that casing and tie a little knot in it. And that’s what starts my first link. And when I start cranking, it’s going to pump that meat out through the tube into that sausage casing. And it will push out away from the tube, pulling the casing with it as it goes. At this point, here’s where you have the option… Basically, if you put your hand around that tube as the casing is getting pulled off of it, how tightly you grab onto that tube and casing will determine how tightly that meat gets packed into the casing. So if you’re doing really tight packing like you would for a german sausage, you’re going to grab that tube a little tighter to just provide more resistance to the casing being pulled off. If you’re doing a loose stuffing like you do on the boudin, just hold it a little looser and allow that meat to flow off naturally and pull that casing off, but you’re not going for quite as tight of a stuffing.
Another tip, have a sharp needle available, and occasionally just poke some tiny pin pricks into that casing. That’s just going to allow any air to escape so you don’t get air bubbles in your sausage. I did mention this stuffer. By the way, this is an LEM stainless steel sausage stuffer with a five pound capacity. If someone was looking for a recommendation on a sausage stuffer, this is the exact one that I would recommend. I absolutely love it. It’s a great size. You really don’t need anything larger. Anything smaller would be obnoxious. I like the hand crank. It’s simple, it’s mechanical, there’s nothing to break. I can easily stop cranking if I want to slow down. It’s super easy to use. Let’s set that aside.
So I did mention that the stuffer came with different sizes of tubes. You may have noticed if you go to your local grocery store or butcher shop, that sausages seem to come in standard sizes. The reason for that is because traditionally, sausages are stuffed into the intestines of certain animals. Usually either sheep, hogs, or cattle. And those animals have different diameters of intestines. So that’s kinda what determines the standard sizes of sausage that you see, whether it’s a hot dog, a brat, or whatever.
Now I’m thinking about slim jims. I wonder what animal has that tiny diameter intestine. Maybe a jackrabbit. Which would make them jackrabbit slims. Wasn’t that the restaurant from Pulp Fiction, where they got steaks? I think that was the restaurant from Pulp Fiction. Ok, we’re going to move on. I think I went too far down that jackrabbit hole.
Anyway, that’s about all there is to stuffing sausage links. When we do that with boudin, I shot for a link length of somewhere around 8 inches. A little longer than what you’d do for a standard brat. So I stuffed it into the links, and I actually had a little leftover. And we’re going to talk in just a minute about what to do with some of that leftover boudin mix. Or if you don’t have a sausage stuffer or casings or whatever. Or if you just don’t feel like getting your sausage stuffer out- some other options for what you can do with that boudin mix after it’s all mixed up. I got them all stuffed, tied off, spun those links, had them all ready to go. The next step, you can either smoke them or bake them in the oven. I opted to poach them. Poaching is the traditional way to cook boudin. Now keep in mind that all of these ingredients, except the green onions, which I’m not that worried about cooking, all of these ingredients have already been cooked. But what we do want to do is to heat it up and serve it nice and hot. So I opted for poaching. Poaching is basically heating something up in hot water but not boiling.
So the way that I do that is to use a stainless steel pot, fill it with water, put it on the stove, turn the burner on, and then I take my meat thermometer. I actually have a digital meat thermometer that I really like, and I drop the probe right into that water. I can set the temperature that I get a little beep at, like 165 is the standard for cooking pork. So I actually wanted my water to poach these sausages between 165 and 175. So I set it to 165, dropped it into the water, left the burner on, and went and probably did dishes or got a beer or something. Beer sounds more fun than dishes. Anyway, that thermometer starts beeping when the water hits 165 degrees. At that point, I know that it’s ready to drop these boudin links into.
These are linked together in these long links and twisted between. You might think do I need to snip between them? No. do not snip between those links to separate the links until after they’re cooked. So take that whole long five feet of boudin links and drop those all into the hot water. And I poached them at 165-175 for 15 minutes. Pulled them out, put them on a rack to cool and then after they were cool enough to hand, that’s when I took some kitchen shears and snipped those links apart so that I had individual links of boudin.
Now at this point, it’s ready to eat. So you have some eating options. We talked about this a little bit earlier. You could absolutely eat this just like a normal sausage. You could throw it on a bun with some mustard and relish and ketchup of bbq or whatever you like to put on your hot dog or brat and eat it like that. It’s totally fine to eat it like that. The traditional way to eat it though, is to actually squeeze it out of the casing and not eat the casing. Now the casing is absolutely edible. That’s the same casing that you would have around a bratwurst or something so it’s totally edible. You don’t have to worry about that. But like I said, the traditional way to eat it is by squeezing it up out of the casing. Either by squeezing it out onto a cracker or something, adding your hot sauce or mustard and eating that. Or basically squeezing it up to the top and eating as you go. And that why boudin is considered kind of a Cajun street food, Cajun on-the-go food. Because it’s a hand food. You can hold it squeeze it, eat it. Definitely use this as a hot sauce delivery method if you’re the type of person, like me, who really enjoys good hot sauce. Because you basically have the excuse to douse every single bite in hot sauce. If you don’t like hot sauce, that’s fine, you can just squeeze it up and eat it as it is.
Now, one of the fun things about boudin. One of the things that makes it a good street food meal is that it’s considered a whole meal. It’s usually not served with sides because it has that meat, fat, rice, and vegetables. So what else do you need? It’s all stuffed into one link. Like I said, some people even consider boudin like a refrigerator cleanout. What leftover vegetables do I have? What leftover meat do I have? I’m going to cook up some rice, run it all through my grinder, and stuff it into links and poach it and call it boudin. So that’s another very lenient option for how to make boudin.
Now if you don’t have a sausage stuffer, or you don’t feel like running your sausage stuffer, you have some other options. You can do all of the same process right up to the point where you’re going to stuff it into those links, and then you could use it as a stuffing for say a chicken or turkey or duck. I’m even thinking now. Now that I’ve mentioned ducks. Some ducks, the ducks that people generally consider more desirable- mallards, canvasbacks, things like that. Now there are some ducks that kind of have a fishy flavor. Some of the diver ducks have a fishy flavor. Some ducks even eat fish. Mergansers actually eat fish, and tend to have that fishy flavor. I’m thinking what if we just embraced that fishy flavor of the duck and made a crawfish or shrimp or seafood boudin and used that as the stuffing for the duck. It might be something to try. Another option, you can take this mix that we’ve made and instead of stuffing it. And honestly this is absolutely amazing. Instead of stuffing it into those links, you’re going to roll it into balls, roll it in some breadcrumbs, and deep fry it. And you’re going to have fried boudin balls, which are amazing. You can dip those in some hot sauce, some bleu cheese dressing. Yeah, those are going to be really good. So those are some other options if you aren’t up for stuffing sausage links or you just want to mix it up a little bit.
So that was my project for this week that I wanted to talk to you about. And maybe that has you thinking about some ideas for some stuff that you’ve had sitting in your freezer that you’re just not sure how to get rid of. Well maybe grinding it and hiding it in a sausage link and dousing it in hot sauce is a great way to get rid of it.
So until next time, eat some boudin, and pursue your mastercraft. Bye.