Mititei

Mititei

Ingredients:
750 g pork shoulder
750 g lamb
3 garlic cloves, chopped
4 ice cubes
½ teaspoon thyme
½ teaspoon chilli powder
1 rounded teaspoon good-quality smoked paprika
2 teaspoons caraway seeds
15 g curing salt

Directions:
1. Cover and chill the meat for a couple of hours, then cube and roughly mince it together
in a bowl. Combine well. Add the garlic and mix in.
2. Wrap the ice cubes in a tea towel and crush with a rolling pin. Alternatively, crush in the
food processor. Mix the remaining ingredients together in a dish and sprinkle over the
meat and crushed ice cubes. Massage the mixture in well with your hands to evenly
distribute all the herbs and spices. Cover the bowl, place in the fridge and leave for 6
hours.
3. Using moist hands, divide the meat mixture into 20–24 little balls then form into
sausage shapes, about 7 cm long. Grill, oven-bake at 180°C (Gas 4) for 25 minutes, or
alternatively, you can fry or barbecue gently. They can be eaten hot or cold.
4. The sausages can be placed in freezer bags or vacuum packs and frozen for up to three
months.
Chapter 8
Dishes using sausages, sauces and accompaniments
This chapter is about some of the uses of sausages and how the manufacture of the
sausage matches that use. You will soon discover there are lots of reasons why some
sausages are very large while others are narrow, long and hard. There is more to sausages
than their geographical origins.
I suppose what follows is the answer to the common question, ‘Can I make a 100 per
cent meat sausage?’ Well, you might just as well eat the meat itself! All the ingredients of
sausages, wherever they are made, are there for a reason, and this includes materials one
might mistakenly consider to be fillers. As we repeatedly encounter in this book, there is
no need for fillers in sausages. Even the simplest breakfast sausage is one of the more
intricate food products we eat, comparable to cheese and more complex pies.
Consequently, every sausage is an evolution of trial and error over many generations to
give you the various types. Thick-skinned sausages are made in this way because of how
they are eaten, how they are stored and so on as opposed to thin-skinned sausages, which
have a completely different culinary niche.
Bangers
It is amazing that the Second World War still affects the way we look at sausages in the
UK. They are an example of how the envelope of manufacture was stretched too far.
Sausages were made with very little in the way of meat, and larger amounts of
breadcrumbs and water. No one bothered to experiment with them because they were
made mostly by independent corner shop butchers. The result was the extra water built up
steam in the cooking sausage, which caused them to explode (bang!), hence the name.
The remedy was to stab the sausages prior to cooking, causing the release of excess
water – and also flavour for that matter. However, some seventy years later the water
content of sausages is much more reasonable, and they no longer explode. Pricking
sausages only allows the flavoursome juices to escape and consequently makes the