I'm fairly new to sausage making, and new to the forum (although I've been lurking for a while).
I've tried Oddley's famous Cumberland Sausage recipe, which I love (as does my husband!).
For my next foray into sausage making I really wanted to make what we in the UK would call a "Toulouse" but I fear the French would sniff at. Although supermarket sausages are not great (and full of rubbish which is part of why I wanted to try making my own in the first place), we like Tesco's Finest Toulouse Sausage.
Based on Oddley's Cumberland, and Tesco's Ingredients lists, I've hodgepodged together a recipe, and I'd love to have the opinion of some expert sausage makers? I'll be stuffing into hog skins as I seem to get on fine with them, I'm sure I'll move onto lamb one soon, but for now pig is working fine
They are supposed to be garlicy, bacony, winey and herby, I've come up with:
- 630g pork shoulder
- 200 pork belly
- 120g smoked back bacon (as I'll be chopping into little pieces rather than mincing I've gone for back bacon so you won't get little chewy fatty pieces like you might with streaky)
- 11g Salt (usually I'd do about 13g, as that's what we've settled on when tweaking Oddley's Cumberland to our preferred salt levels, but as bacon is salty I thought I should lower it?)
- 100g breadcrumbs (I used rusk in my second batch of cumberlands by they turned out drier than before, having looked on these forums, If I use rusk again i'll be upping the liquid by .5)
- 100g liquid/Merlot (Tesco only calls for 2% red wine but that doesn't seem like a lot, what would be a good percentage of wine or wine and water?)
- 6 cloves garlic (is this too much garlic?)
- Herbs, my guess is aprx: 1.5g back pepper, 1.3g parsley, 1g marjoram, 1g sage, 1g thyme, 1g tarragon but these are complete guesses. I want the thyme to come through, but apart from the sage and pepper it is one of the stronger tasting herbs in the mix.
Does this sounds like it would work, is there anything obviously wrong?
I've found that mincing only one through the coarse plate on my kenwood seems to produce the best results for us so far, mincing twice seems to result in too 'tight?' a sausage.
Once everything is added I mix for a few minutes with the paddle attachment of my kenwood until the mix looks 'furry/fuzzy' as I've read that helps with the myosin (a bit like developing bread gluten). This method seems to have made a really good cumberland.
Thank you for all your help!
You might want to blanch the garlic in boiling water for 15 seconds if you are going to use 6 cloves. Let us know how it comes out.