Something New

Since long before running our own farm I have loved making sausage. When I lived in Spain, I spent time learning about, tasting and enjoying many types of sausage. On the first few farms that I worked on I made sausage from bits and scraps, even using makeshift smokehouses to try some smoked sausages. In our first few years of the farm we made all our own pork sausages, with elaborate recipes, fresh ingredients and lots of love. 

We do not make the sausages anymore and now have our pork processed at a USDA facility. But  it is still a process I love and miss. I have dreams of making our own pork sausage again, or perhaps working with our processor to make our own custom recipes. 

Pork is not the only type of sausage however…This week was an exciting week for me and my sausage enthusiasm. With the last batch of chickens in the freezer we took on one more week of processing to try an experiment. (I love experiments:)

Over the last few weeks I have been looking into how to make ground chicken, and if we have ground chicken what would a chicken sausage look like and what cut should we take the ground chicken from? The obvious choice is to grind the breast and tender, but we found that an all white meat grind was too dry. Plus we often sell out of chicken breast, so I was hesitant to throw any in the grinder.

So we started playing with the dark meat, thighs and drumsticks. Yum, the ground chicken was delicious. We deboned them and left the skin on and the ground chicken was flavorful and not dry. Next the trick was learning to efficiently debone each cut, especially the drumsticks. There is a pin bone and some sinew, which is important to leave out. After some youtube videos, a few hours of practice and some “drumstick races” we were ready for sausage this week.

On Monday we deboned and ground up a few hundred lbs of chicken and I was so excited we had some for lunch and dinner! We eat a lot of ground beef and ground pork in our house because I love to make my own sausage at meal time. For dinner I made chicken chorizo (kid friendly). Here’s how I made a quick homemade sausage:

Homemade Mild Chicken Chorizo Sausage

Ingredients:

• 1 lb Reber Rock Farm Pasture Raised Organic Ground Chicken
• 2 cloves of garlic, minced
• ½ – 1 tsp of salt depending on salt preference
• 2 tsp ground cumin (I didn’t have a 3rd teaspoon so I did ⅔ full tablespoon)
• Large pinch of dried marjoram
• 1 tsp spanish paprika
• (Optional) ¼ tsp cayenne pepper

Put ground chicken in a bowl, sprinkle the spices over it. If the marjoram is full leaves, crush it with your hand by rolling it around between your two palms. Then using your hands or a mixing spoon, mix the sausage thoroughly. Put the bowl back in the fridge for up to 24 hours to let the flavors settle, or do what I did and cook it right away.

On Tuesday we set out to make our first batch of chicken sausage. I had experimented back in 2017 with some chicken sausage, so I had some notes to go on, but this was our first official chicken sausage making, and man I was excited! I wanted to choose a flavor that would compliment the chicken and that was not redundant to our existing sausage lineup. I landed on Chicken Curry.

Curry has a wonderful flavor, great for fall and winter cooking and if we manage the spices well it can be kid friendly too. I have an elaborate “sausage spreadsheet,” and I played with a few test batches to get the curry and white pepper just right. I eventually settled on a simple recipe: sea salt, organic curry powder, minced organic garlic, ground organic white pepper and a touch of white wine.

Rheema, who helps out with all aspects of our chicken processing, is also a professional chef. I love talking about food and cooking with her and bouncing ideas around. She admitted she was skeptical about the white wine so we cooked up a few patties during the lunch break. We called in Racey for the testing and the verdict was unanimous: great curry taste, light pepper notes and just subtle aromatics of the wine. 

We made approximately 80 lbs of the Chicken Curry Sausage. There is a limited quantity and we would love to hear your feedback so add a few pounds to your next order and let us know what you think. 

Piglet update

As soon as the piglets are trained to respect the boundary of the electric fence we set up a large area in the woods for them to forage, root and explore. The beach nuts have been plentiful this year and they have been happily snuffling about searching for treats hidden beneath the leaf litter. 

The first day we let them out into their new area we always notice lots of feed left in their feed troughs. Why eat grain when there are so many treats to find in the woods?