[USA] Beef fajita sausage and chicken sausage

CrankyBuzzard · Post by **CrankyBuzzard** » Fri Dec 28, 2012 06:27

Well, #1 son and I got busy with it today alone since #2 son wasn't feeling too well.

We made chicken sausage with spinach and Mexican crumbling cheese, beef fajita sausage, and Swedish potato sausage.

First up was to prep the chicken for the chicken sausage. I used about 50/50 dark and white meat for this and it has worked well for me in the past.

The dark meat was mostly legs and thighs

The meat was COLD, if you look close you can see the ice crystals.

All the meat was removed from the bone and then the bones were cracked and placed into a pot for making broth.

After cutting the chicken from the bone and getting the broth started we prepped the beef for the fajita sausage. No pics of grinding since most all of us are familiar with that process.

Veggies and spices ready for the beef fajita sausage

Fajita sausage all mixed up and ready to chill for a while!

Chicken sausage mixing time.
Spices ready to mix

#1 son chopping the spinach

Yes, he's a perfectionist!

Time to get messy!

The finished products came out really well. The chicken sausage is now the wife's favorite and the beef fajita will ROCK with a few more tweaks!

The boy's take home kit! LOTS of sausage! Top row is chicken sausage, middle is potato, and far right in the coils is fajita. We plan to smoke the fajita tomorrow morning.

Now, about the sausages:

The chicken sausage is nothing that hasn't been done on here before, but I'm not sure if others do theirs at the end the way we do. Once all of the chicken sausage is stuffed, I drop it into 185 degree water and let it poach until the internal temperature just exceeds 165 degrees F. At that point I drop the poached sausages into an ice water bath and then vacuum pack for freezing. By doing this I've never had an issue defrosting in the frig and then smoking until hot.

The beef fajita sausage is something #1 and I have been discussing for a while and we decided to do it this week while he was home. Instead of running the veggies through the grinder like we did on the potato and chicken sausages, we course chopped these for the fajita. I think we would have been better off if we hadn't grilled the veggies first since we lost a little color and they got a bit softer than we wanted prior to cooking. Now, the flavor is there, but still needs a little tweaking before we all it finalized for the main recipe book we keep.

The broth mentioned earlier is used for not only the liquids in these 2 sausages, but it's also the base for the poaching water used for the chicken sausages. Today we had 3 pots of broth going due to all of the bones we generated. We started with around 5-gallons of water and ended up with just over 1-gallon of very rich broth. The broth we didn't use was cooled and then poured into ice trays for future use.

I didn't take any pics of the potato sausage work since I've posted that one a couple of times before.

If anyone would like the recipes or has any questions, just let me know. I'm going to eat a plate full of potatis korv now!

Charlie

Chuckwagon · Post by **Chuckwagon** » Sat Dec 29, 2012 01:03

Absolutely beautiful! And the photos are great. The photos of the sausages cut in half really make an outstanding post presentation. Thanks for sharing Charlie. Nice to spend quality time with your son eh? Don't stop now big guy!

Best Wishes,
Chuckwagon

el Ducko · Post by **el Ducko** » Sat Dec 29, 2012 01:11

They say that great minds think alike. Well, I'm sorry to drag you down to my level, but I too did a similar effort this afternoon. I made some Greek Turkey sausage, using the late Rytek Kutas' recipe, with ground turkey and spinach and feta cheese. ...looks similar to your chicken sausage results. (...then the "Texas Hot Links" recipe.)

...will try your poaching routine on the turks. Thanks for "being there for me." ...very timely advice. What would you thjink about poaching it in broth? (I'll have to cook up some.) I guess the broth could then be saved for other uses, having already been cooked.

What are we going to next? (Hint: gimme the fajita recipe, puh-leeze!)

Smokin Don · Post by **Smokin Don** » Sat Dec 29, 2012 05:41

That is some great looking sausage CB! I can almost taste it! Don

Chuckwagon · Post by **Chuckwagon** » Sat Dec 29, 2012 11:57

El Quack-Up wrote:

I too did a similar effort this afternoon. I made some Greek Turkey sausage, using the late Rytek Kutas' recipe, with ground turkey and spinach and feta cheese. ...looks similar to your chicken sausage results.

Hey Pato, let us have a look-see. Photo please. Inquiring minds have to have a look.

Best Wishes,
Chuckwagon

el Ducko · Post by **el Ducko** » Sat Dec 29, 2012 19:37

Chuckwagon wrote:El Quack-Up wrote:
I too did a similar effort this afternoon. I made some Greek Turkey sausage, using the late Rytek Kutas' recipe, with ground turkey and spinach and feta cheese. ...looks similar to your chicken sausage results.
Hey Pato, let us have a look-see. Photo please. Inquiring minds have to have a look.

Best Wishes,
Chuckwagon

Uh oh! It's been either eaten or frozen. Next time you're in the neighborhood, though, stop in for lunch.

Here ya go! The mottling...? That's spinach

CrankyBuzzard · Post by **CrankyBuzzard** » Sat Dec 29, 2012 20:58

Recipes for sausages and broth me and the boys made a couple of days ago. Broth recipe is at the bottom

Here are the recipes used for the sausages above:

Beef Fajita Sausage

6# beef (we used chuck roast)
3 Bell peppers chopped (red, green, orange)
2 white onions chopped
65 grams fajita seasoning (We used my blend that I sell, but store bought will work)
20 grams sugar
16 grams kosher salt
12 grams ancho chili powder (fresh ground from ancho chili peppers, no additives)
9 grams paprika
6 grams dehydrated garlic
6 grams powdered cumin (we toasted the seeds and then ground them in the spice grinder)
6 grams cure (optional since we will slow smoke ours)
300 mL chicken broth (didn't have beef stock)

100 mL white wine

Use all of the wine, and then use only what you need of the broth to get the consistency you need for the sausage mix.

We didn't run the veggies through the grinder, just finely chopped and mixed in.

Chicken Sausage

6# chicken (50/50 white and dark)
230 grams Mexican crumbling cheese (Feta will work as well, but the wife doesn't are for it)
28.5 grams kosher salt
12 grams white pepper
9 grams paprika (smoked)
1 bunch of spinach chopped to desired size
3 cloves garlic (we ran ours through a garlic press to get all the oils and juice)
1 gram dry oregano
1 gram dry basil
1 gram dry thyme
1 BIG white onion
Chicken stock to get the consistency desired.

Grind the meat and the onion together. To make sure we had enough fat we added ALL of the yellow fat from the bottom of the bird pieces and a few pieces of skin.

Mix everything together and stuff!

To poach the chicken sausages we added 700mL of chicken broth to enough water to cover the sausages (take a guess at it). Then the water was brought up to 180 degrees F and held there. Place the sausages into the hot water and allow to poach until you reach 165 degrees F internally.

Then freeze or cook. This helps to cook faster and to also keep the shape you want.

To cook these sausages after freezing, we remove the sausages from the freezer, unwrap them, place into cold water in a pan, turn the heat to high, and once the water begins to boil we let them go for about 1 hour. Done to perfection.

Broth recipe

Take all bones from the chicken and crack open to expose marrow.
Place the bones into a large pot with some celery, onion, carrots, a few peppercorns, and a bay leaf or 2.
Fill the pot with water almost to the top
Turn on the heat and bring to a boil
Once it begins to boil, reduce the heat to a slight boil and leave it alone until about 3/4 of the water has evaporated.
Strain the solids from the broth and enjoy!

This broth when refrigerated will turn to gelatin due to the goodness of the bone marrow. We ended up with over a gallon of good broth, and what we didn't use, we poured into ice trays and froze. After freezing, we removed the cubes from the trays and placed the cubes into bags and keep in the freezer for future use.

Any questions, give me a shout.

Charlie

el Ducko · Post by **el Ducko** » Sun Dec 30, 2012 01:11

I grind pork butts and freeze 'em in 1-kg packages, so I can try various recipes. Usually, when I try something, I'll have some left over. That was the case with the Greek Turkey & Spinach sausages, above (which, BTW, were delicious). I rounded out the day by scaling the recipe for the rest of the pork plus the requisite amount of beef, to make our signature sausage, "Texas Hot Links." (See the forum members' recipe collection.)

Here's that promised other picture, as they appear after four hours of intermittent pecan smoke, just out of the ice bath, ready to dry off/package/freeze. As always, I never seem to come out even. Can you tell which one is the "runt"?

(Actually, it was the longer-than-usual one.)

Now it's off to the vacuum sealer and beddie-bye in the freezer. ...briefly. The test patty was delicious. These won't be around long.

CrankyBuzzard · Post by **CrankyBuzzard** » Sun Dec 30, 2012 01:38

Sir Duck,

I can attest that the Texas Hot Links ROCK!

We've made those quite a few times since you first posted the recipe. Like you said, they don't hang around long!

Charlie

el Ducko · Post by **el Ducko** » Sun Dec 30, 2012 19:39

Credit for the Texas Smokey Hot Links has to go to BlackRiver (see http://wedlinydomowe.pl/en/viewtopic.ph ... +hot+links). ...bet you didn't realize that Texas extends all the way north to Wisconsin, did you?

Man, these are good! I like the comino (but be careful and don't add too much). Interestingly, that little bit of clove really helps the flavor.

Chuckwagon · Post by **Chuckwagon** » Mon Dec 31, 2012 12:39

Hey Duck my man,
The sausages look grand! I've got a question though. You say they are Greek Turkey Sausages. Well, how do Greek turkeys differ from regular ol' gobblers? Do they speak Greek?

Distorted minds want to know!

el Ducko · Post by **el Ducko** » Sat Apr 06, 2013 13:08

Got any tweaks for that fajita sausage recipe, Crankie? I thought I'd fire up the ol' grinder today and do the recipe a little differently. We have a block of frozen H.E.B pre-marinated fajitas that needs to be eaten and I thought, "Hey! Why not make some sausage out of it?"

I'll need to do some adapting to your recipe because of two items. One, the meat is skirt steak, rather than your chuck roast, plus two, it's already marinated. I'm thinking that I should cut back on the seasoning, because of the marinade.

The fat issue is pretty straightforward, I guess. I figure I'd better add some pork fat to get it up into the mid-20 percent range. Skirt steak is pretty lean. Question is, should I do a mix of beef and pork fat? Color issues aside, the taste is quite different.

Any advice out there in sausage-land? One alternate: I could blend it off, 50/50 with pork butt. Maybe I'll try a bit of that, on the side, and report back. You inquiring minds out there are bound to want to know.
Duk

ssorllih · Post by **ssorllih** » Sat Apr 06, 2013 14:49

I suggest that the mouth feel of beef fat is also quite different than pork fat but that is not necessarily and bad thing. Beef suet is called for in some meat pie recipes and doughnuts fried in tallow are superior in taste to those fried in lard.

el Ducko · Post by **el Ducko** » Sat Apr 06, 2013 23:34

Well, I took the easy way out, and added ground bacon to get an estimated 25% fat. We'll see how it works out. This particular brand of beef (HEB Beef Fajitas, pre-marinated) is pretty consistently good. I'll report back.

The meat, by the way, is a far cry from what used to happen back in the eighties, when the fajita craze was just catching on. It's diaphragm muscle (a.k.a. skirt steak), mechanically tenderized, then soaked for three or four days in "secret sauce," which often was Italian dressing and jalapeño pickling liquid. The original recipe called for nailing the beef to a board, charring it in the fire, peeling it off, and eating the board. ...but you knew that.

After one particular disaster, our kids came to call it "rubber meat." It's come a long way. That cut of beef used to be given away, or would sell for fifty cents a pound. It caught on in trendy bars across the land, and now costs as much as a good cut of steak.

Chuckwagon · Post by **Chuckwagon** » Sun Apr 07, 2013 00:45

Tried these recipes yesterday. Wow... Outstanding.
I thought I might substitute some real cranky buzzard meat for the chicken, but "chickened out" at the last minute. I found a cranky buzzard alright, but the danged thing was smilin' back at me. Didn't have the heart to shoot it.

Thanks for sharing CBuzz, these are terrific recipes.

Best Wishes,
Chuckwagon