There are many ways to embrace your own, or learn about someone else’s, culture. You could always read some of their best literature, listen to their folk music, or my favourite: try their food. Like Andrew Zimmern always says, and I’m paraphrasing since I can’t find the exact quote, you best learn someone else’s culture by eating.
A few weeks back we acquired a meat mincer and a sausage stuffer. Today I thought I would honour some of my English heritage, as little as it is, and make a classic English sausage: hog’s pudding. Hog’s pudding is from the southwestern part of England. It’s a typical pork sausage filled with various spices, fillers, and fat.
Across the pond “pudding’ doesn’t mean what it means in Canada and the U.S.A. Here pudding is a custard-like dessert usually flavoured vanilla or chocolate and either eaten alone or put into various cakes, doughnuts, and various pastries. In the British Isles, pudding can mean a variety of things, such as sausages/bangers (black pudding, white pudding, etc), Yorkshire pudding, Christmas pudding (similar to Fruitcake in Canada and the US), and many much more.
The reason this is split into parts is that this is my maiden voyage on the HMS Sausage Making. Yes, it is my first sausage I am attempting to make, so I’m doing live updates. Future salumi posts will be one post.
500G/1.21LBS of Lean Pork
150g/1.3 cups of filler**
*usually back fat from a pig, you can also use bacon, jowl bacon, or suet
**filler is usually breadcrumbs, cooked oats, cooked rice, or rusk
Here are your ingredients: diced pork, cooked rice, spice rub.
Run your meat and fat through your mincer, I recommend cubing them both first.
Add in your rice and spice mix and then give it a good mix, either by hand or by a mixer.
If you’re being hasty you can go ahead and stuff it now, but you should let it sit overnight in the fridge, wrapped up, then re-run through the mincer just to make sure everything is blended in back together.
I plan on doing that tomorrow and I will post an update.