Episode 139: Cajun Boudin Sausage
I’m not one of those people who never buys any meat from the grocery store. I admire them, but I’m not one of them. That said, the vast majority of our meat comes from animals that we hunt, catch or raise ourselves, or animals that we purchase from local farms. We purchase our pork as whole hogs from a friend who raises them. Purchasing your meat this way, you have the option to take any and all cuts of meat from that animal. Not wanting to be wasteful, we take everything- the heart, liver, kidneys, hocks, tongue, jowels, extra fat, and so on. Some of those cuts are really easy to use, but I don’t particularly care for liver on its own.
So there I was, looking into the deep freezer, and wondering what I was going to do with these two livers from our last two hogs. Normally, with our wild game, I just chop the liver up and grind it in with the rest of the ground meat to make a variety of sausage and burgers. Then I remembered that traditional Cajun boudin is made from a mix of pork meat and pork liver. That was all it took, and I was working on a big batch of boudin!
If you’re not familiar with it, boudin is a traditional Cajun linked sausage that typically includes some sort of meat, fat, vegetables, and rice. It can range from very mild to very spicy, depending on your preference. One of the really unique things though, is that it’s normally eaten by squeezing the contents of the casing up toward one end and taking a bite at a time. This makes it a really great delivery method for consuming hot sauce, if you’re a connoisseur of fine hot sauce.
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