Spice (50 page)
Authors: Ana Sortun
Try substituting white pepper for black pepper for an earthier and more complementary flavor to the fenugreek. Freshly grated white pepper on buttery potato purée is divine!
This recipe was inspired by my Turkish friend Ihsan Gurdhal. For a few summers, during the month of July, I shared a house near the beach with a group of friends including Ihsan and his wife Valerie.
The best days were those when Ihsan would get up early and make a breakfast dish that he called “doggy eggs” because he served them to us in a large, stainless-steel bowl that resembled a dog dish. Ihsan would bike up the street to fetch farm-fresh eggs from a roadside stand, where he’d drop his money into a tin can. When he returned, he’d prepare his signature breakfast. Everyone in the beach house got hooked on doggy eggs, and we’d beg Ihsan to make his breakfast treat. Eventually, we developed a sense of technique and teamwork: one person would toast, butter, and tear the bread into a giant mixing bowl, while Ihsan prepared the pancetta or basturma and poached the eggs.
The magic of doggy eggs is the way the bread soaks up the spicy basturma flavors and absorbs the runny, rich yolks from the poached eggs. Farm-fresh eggs make the best doggy eggs. You need to cook the basturma lightly, for if it cooks too long the spices will burn and become bitter.
Make your own vegetable juice (tomato, celery, and carrots pushed through a juice extractor) and serve it with lime over ice with this hearty breakfast that will last you all day at the beach.
S
ERVES
4
4 slices country bread or sourdough, toasted and buttered
1 tablespoon chopped fresh chives or scallions
1 teaspoon olive oil or butter
8 paper-thin slices fatty basturma (see Resources, page 358)
1 teaspoon white vinegar
4 eggs, preferably fresh
Salt and plenty of freshly ground pepper to taste
1.
Tear the toast into small bits by hand (about ¼ inch) into a large mixing bowl and add the chives. Set aside.
2.
In a large sauté pan over medium-high heat, heat the olive oil until hot and add the basturma slices. Cook the basturma on one side only until it curls up a bit and the fat renders and melts. It should take 3 to 4 minutes. Don’t let the basturma get dark or too crispy.
3.
Scrape the basturma and any of its oils into the bowl with the torn toast.
4.
Bring a small saucepan of water to a boil over high heat. Reduce the heat to medium-low so that it simmers. Add the vinegar.
5.
Break 1 egg into a ramekin.
6.
Using a large slotted spoon, stir the water in a circular pattern so that you create a spiral motion in the water, and drop the egg in. Add eggs this way, one by one. Stirring the water when you drop the eggs in forces the whites to stay close to the yolks and not scatter in shards. Let the eggs poach for 4 to 4½ minutes, until the white is set but the yolks are very runny.
7.
Remove the eggs with a slotted spoon and drain them on a paper towel.
8.
Drop the eggs into the mixing bowl and toss them with the toast and basturma, breaking them up a bit and stirring until the yolks are absorbed by the bread and the bread becomes swollen from the yolks. Add salt and pepper. Spoon into deep soup or doggy-sized bowls and serve immediately.
Sujuk
, which means “sausage” in Arabic, is a delicious meat preparation spiced with fenugreek and chilies. In Muslim countries, sujuk is made with lamb or beef; Armenians and Greeks use beef that is sometimes combined with pork.
At Oleana, I had explored making homemade sujuk because I don’t care for any of the commercially available brands. I find them to be too lean and dry. I spent years asking every Armenian and Greek person I knew how they made their sujuk. No one would share their secret. It seemed to be protected by the family!
So, after much trial and error, Cassie Kyriakides, who works in Oleana’s kitchen with me, helped me develop a sujuk recipe that she now makes at her day job in the south end of Boston’s Butcher Shop. We serve sujuk on our winter menu accompanied by Squash Kibbeh (page 106) and plenty of Sumac Onions (page 98).
If you have an electric mixer (such as a KitchenAid) with a sausagemaking attachment and meat grinder, it is very easy to make fresh sausage. Hog casings, available online at www.sausagemaker.com, make long, thin, hot-dog-shaped sausages.
To make meatball-shaped handmade sausages, you can use caul fat, a weblike membrane from internal organs, to wrap parcels of sausage meat (called
crepinettes
in France) and either grill or fry them. The caul fat acts as a sausage skin and also bastes the meat as it cooks. It dissolves after slow cooking but is attractive enough in its own right. Making handmade sausages with caul fat is the easier of the two methods, but caul fat can be hard to come by. Pork caul fat, which is the best, should be available from most good butchers.
If you don’t have a meat grinder attachment on your mixer, have your butcher grind the meat for you—and ask to have the meat frozen before grinding. Very cold sausage will have the best texture: if it’s too warm when ground, the fat will whip into the meat and the sausage won’t render properly. The flavor will still be wonderful, but the sausage will be soft and dry, since the fat will have escaped during the cooking process.
These delicious spicy sausages pair well with beer, especially India pale ale or a Belgian-style ale.
M
AKES SİXTEEN
4-
OUNCE SAUSAGES TO SERVE
8
AS A MAİN COURSE
2½ pounds pork shoulder
½ pound beef chuck
1 pound pork fatback
¾ teaspoon ground allspice
¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
1½ teaspoons crushed fenugreek leaves (see page 198)
1½ teaspoons ground fennel seed
1½ teaspoons black pepper
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 tablespoon paprika
1½ teaspoons sugar
¼ cup kosher salt
Hog casings for sixteen 6-inch sausages or 2 large pieces of caul fat plus a few extra for practice or to use as a taste test
1.
Cut the pork shoulder, beef, and fatback into 1-inch cubes and lay the cubes out on a large baking sheet.
2.
Place the meat and fat in the freezer for 15 to 20 minutes, until the meat and fat are frosty but not frozen solid.
3.
Using a meat grinder (or a meat-grinding attachment for a mixer) pass the pork and beef through the large die or grinding blade (the circular piece with holes) into a large mixing bowl. Then pass it through the small die or grinding blade. Finally, pass the fatback through the small die or grinding blade only.
4.
Combine the ground meat and fatback with the spices, sugar, and salt and mix thoroughly.
5.
Spread the mixture on a large metal baking sheet and freeze it again for about 15 minutes, until the mixture is frosty but not frozen solid.
6.
Prepare the hog casings by rinsing the inside of each individual casing thoroughly to remove salt and excess particles. You can place the end of the casing on your faucet as though you were filling a water balloon and then let warm water (not hot or cold) rinse through each casing for about 3 minutes. After rinsing, let the casings soak in warm water for up to 10 minutes and drain.
7.
Slip one end of each clean casing over the tip of the extruder attachment (for stuffing sausages) and feed the meat into a long sausage. Don’t fill the skins too tightly or they’ll burst when frying—even if you prick them with a fork. It may take two or three tries to get them just right, so make a few beforehand, for practice.
8.
Twist the sausage every 6 inches to form individual sausages.
9.
Hang the sausages up or lay them out in the refrigerator, uncovered, for 2 days to dry out a little and mature in flavor. This gives the meat a little time to cure. Once the meat has dried, it will shrink a bit so you’ll have a better seal. You can then cut them off at the twists as needed or cut them and freeze half.
Cooking Instructions for Sausage