A brand new sausage recipe! Sri Lankan Black boar curry sausages

Greeting Fire Friends!

Today a brand new recipe for you to try; Sri Lankan Black boar curry sausages, and it’s a good’un. 

I’m sharing this recipe with all of my lovely Substack followers, both paid subs and free subs. If you are reading it for free I would be exceedingly grateful if you could take a moment to share it with ONE other person! It will help me grow this little platform and spread the word about Stuff That Fires Me Up. And if you fancy upgrading to a paid sub - for less than a quid a week - you’ll get more access to my fire-skills, including free online masterclasses and behind the scenes stuff. Writing takes time and energy, and writing is also one of the ways I pay my mortgage, so I really appreciate those who support me in building this space.

Thank you xxx

I’m just about to head into a period when I’m on the road pretty much constantly… cooking feasts and doing demo’s at various festivals, heading up to Scotland for an exciting whisky gig, squeezing in a little holiday before carrying on with the festival circuit via London, Dublin, Oxford. I think between mid July and early September I have a handful of nights in my own bed. Trying to bank a little stamina this week by eating well and getting plenty of zzzz’s.

First stop, this weekend, is the Goodlife Society where I am cooking for a hundred or so, and taking my best mate Jo for moral and practical support (she’s a total demon cook). And this sausage will form part of a big Sri Lankan feast. A few years ago I spent 3 weeks on the teardrop in the ocean that is Sri Lanka and I can confirm it to be one of the most beautiful places I have ever been.

I made 400 or so of these sausages on Saturday morning just gone with my pal Matt, @GroveGameLarder on instagram. You can see a quick reel of the process on my feed (@GenevieveEats). We tasted a little bit to check the seasoning and it was so very good I thought I should share a more domestic sized batch with you all.

Making sausages is quite the process, something I think of as a good ‘wet weather play’ activity.  You need a meat grinder (you can get attachments for food mixers) and ideally a separate dedicated sausage-filling machine. Grinders often have attachments for filling but they are not the best tool for the job (as I discovered to my cost); it’s quite hard, but not impossible, to control the flow of the filling and reduce air gaps. Air gaps make for a baggy sausage, and one that’s prone to bursting on cooking. Two pairs of hands are also useful. Perhaps a good date night?!?

You can obviously buy perfectly good mince for sausages and burgers but mincing your own is surprisingly satisfying. There’s something good about knowing your meat is coming from one animal, just as it would be if you were roasting a joint. You also get to choose the exact cuts of meat you want to mince and you can control the fat level; in most cases fat is flavour and you want to aim for a good 20% fat. You can combine different meats together and you can add seasonings as you mince so everything gets blended to your specification.

When you are making your own mince its important everything stays as cold as possible. You are increasing the surface area of the meat as you grind it, and that therefore increases the potential for harmful pathogens to colonise. Start with very cold meat, ideally partly frozen if its a hot day, and chill down all the moving parts of the mincing machine that contact the meat too, so the auger, cutting blade and grinding discs. Work as quickly as you can and get it in the fridge between stages.

If you can’t be arsed to make sausages (I hear you!) you can still make the mix and fry it in little patties as burgers, or shape into meatballs and use in a tomato-based sauce as a spicy meatball with rice kinda dish.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.

Big love,

GT

x

Sri Lankan Black boar curry sausages

Two hard to find ingredients here that do add an important flavour and worth seeking out if you can.  I brought both of mine for this recipe online but doing a good old google search.

• goraka, which is the dried flesh of a mangosteen like seed. It adds a nice sourness, and it’s nearest relative would be tamarind, and you could substitute that if you couldn’t get it. 

• And pandan, or screw pine, leaves - long strap like leaves that you can often find frozen in a Chinese supermarket.

Yes, the curry powder has a lot of other ingredients but the layers of freshness and complexity you get from making your own spice blends is never going to be matched by a ready made powder. I always toast, mix and grind my own spices, it’s just a natural habit for me now so doesn’t feel like any extra effort. If it ever all feels to much with a recipe that’s got lots of ingredients or steps, try to spilt the jobs down over a couple of days. So here, you could make the spice blend and the fragrant onion base the day before you want to cook and eat the sausages. 

makes 10-12 chipolatas (easily scaled up, they freeze well!)

2 pieces goraka (see intro!)

1 red onion, roughly chopped 

3 cloves garlic, peeled 

1 stem lemongrass, roughly chopped

25g ginger, roughly chopped

2-4 green chillis, to taste

2 tsp Maldon salt

1 tbsp vegetable oil

400g diced wild boar 

100g diced fatty pork belly

3 tbsp cold water

for the curry powder

2 tbsp coriander seeds

1 tbsp cumin seeds

1 tbsp basmati rice 

2 tsp fennel seeds

1 tsp fenugreek seeds

1 tsp peppercorns

1 tsp cardamon pods

4 cloves

1 tsp chilli powder

1 tsp ground cinnamon 

a sprig fresh curry leaves, about 10-12 leaves

10cm pandan leaf, snipped into 5mm pieces (see intro!)

you also need 3m or so of lamb casings soaked overnight in cold water to make the chipolatas. You can use hog casings which will give you a fatter sausage. You’ll make less, maybe 6-8.

Put the goraka pieces in a small heat proof bowl and cover with boiling water. Set aside to soften for 10 minutes or so.

Add the onion, garlic, lemongrass, ginger, chilli’s and salt to a small food processor, along with the goraka and soaking water, and blitz until pulped. 

Set an saucepan over a medium low heat on the hob and pour in the vegetable oil. Add the onion pulp and fry gently for a good 10-15 minutes to soften. Scoop into a shallow dish and set aside to cool completely. 

For the curry powder, set a small frying pan over a medium heat on the hob and tip in the coriander and cumin seeds, basmati rice, fennel, fenugreek, peppercorns, cardamon and cloves. Toast for a minute or two until they smell super fragrant then tip into a bowl, stir through the chilli powder and cinnamon, and leave to cool. Add the curry leaves and little bits of pandan leaf to the pan and toast until dried then add tot he whole spice and leave to cool. Once cold, grind to a powder in a spice mill. Set aside.

When you are ready to mix the sausages tip the boar and pork belly into a mixing bowl. Add the curry powder, cold onion mixture and water stir together really well so the meat it evenly coated. Pass the mix through a meat grinder twice. At this point you can chill the mixture for a few hours, or you can get on with stuffing. Or you can shape into burgers or meatballs if you don’t want to make sausages.

To fill the sausages, set up your sausage stuffer or convert your mincer with a stuffing attachment. Load the machine with the cold sausage mixture, pressing it well down to minimise any air gaps.  Lightly grease the nozzle with a few drops of vegetable oil to help load the casings on smoothly. Drain the soaked casings in a sieve and rinse under a cold tap. Find one end of the casing and feed it onto the nozzle – this is perhaps the trickiest part of the whole process, so be patient! Set a wet tray under the nozzle to catch the sausages as they land – the water just helps them slide along easily as they are made so you will avoid a sausage pile-up!

With the sausage mixture loaded into the machine and the casing in place, start to fill the casing, going slowly at first and trying to maintain an even pressure so the links will be an even thickness. This may take a bit of practice, but remember that even slightly wonky links will taste great.

Once you have a long length of sausage it’s time to form the links. Use your thumb and forefinger to pinch in and twist into the lengths you want. 

Once you’ve made all your sausages, rest them on a wire rack set over a tray and put in the fridge, uncovered, for 24 hours for the skins to dry out. This will help prevent the skins splitting on cooking and also allows plenty of time for the spicy flavours to marinate the meat.

When you are ready to cook, fire up your barbecue for two zone grilling. I would light a small central fire in the middle of my kettle, then arrange the sausages around the outside so they all cooked with an equidistant gentle heat. You can add a little smoking wood (a fist sized chunk is plenty) if you fancy a slightly smoky sausage.

Cook over an indirect heat for about 30 minutes or so, then slide slightly hotter to crisp them up at the end.