Week 10: Thanksgiving Grindset, part 2
We keep putting our minds to it, so we keep putting our grinds to it.
Welcome to Sausage Season, the newsletter for people who want to to know how the sausage is made. It is Thanksgivingtime, so we are in full #grindset mode. (Scroll down for a lemon pepper sausage update.) The Thanksgiving #grindset is about doing things the hard way. Jack Reacher does things the hard way by headbutting people in jail. Here at Sausage Season, we do things the hard way by doing them ourselves. Sam Sifton has my go-to Thanksgiving dressing recipes, which are on the NYT food site, and also in his essential Thanksgiving book. I am trying to be a little bit saner this year, and on the day, making only two dressings. I have never been able to get cornbread dressing right, so I am not doing that. I am doing the basic bread dressing, in both a regular and sausage-enhanced version, a move I learned from my sister-in-law.
In this house, we use the terms “dressing” and “stuffing” interchangeably. Never put either in the bird, unless you have a salmonella kink. In any case, we are #TeamSpatchcock, so there is nowhere to put the stuffing. I grew up calling it stuffing, and will refer to as such here, even though it goes into a pan in the oven.
As I mentioned last week, one of my guiding lights in the kitchen is Judy Rogers, who would ask “is there a harder way to do this?” What this means in practice is starting sooner, and with more basic ingredients. In the past, I have made this stuffing with store bought Italian sausage and store bought bread. I was curious what would happen if I made the sausage and the bread at home.
I went with Samin’s Italian sausage recipe, because she knows what’s what. It’s hard to make a little bit of sausage, so I ended up grinding 2lb of country style spare ribs. At the risk of sounding like my grandfather, I was a little bit concerned about the seasoning being too aggressively Italian, and thus striking a discordant note in the palette of Thanksgiving flavors.
For bread, I went with the Forkish standard white. Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast is a serious book for serious people. It was an important lifeline for me during Covid. The bread turned out great, and, spoiler alert, I am sorry that I sacrificed one whole loaf to the stuffing. For this version, I added 1/2 lb of the Samin sausage I made to the basic Sifton recipe.
The stuffing turned out well. Making sausage from scratch was a worthwhile upgrade. Also, as always, when you grind your own meat, you know what’s in there, which is nice. Honestly, I think an unsliced bread from Publix would have done as well for the bread, and maybe better, b/c the crusts of the Forkish loaf are maybe a bit too ornery for this application. The flip side of doing things the hard way is that sometimes better is not better. Famously, one of the challenges for making Philly cheesesteaks at home is finding meat of a low enough grade to make an authentic sandwich
So, I will be running the sausage stuffing back on Thanksgiving, and it will be an upgrade.
Shrewd readers will note that we started with 2 lb of this Italian sausage, and used 1/2 lb in the stuffing recipe. Where is the rest? Well, what happened was there are people in our house to feed between now and Thanksgiving. I browned up 1/2 lb of the sausage, pulled that out of the pan, chopped up 1 lb of shiitakes, cooked that in the sausage fat, deglazed with some sake, cooked that down with some of the turkey stock from last week, and then put in a few slugs of cream and cooked that down with some thyme and sage. I served some of that over orchetti, and put the leftover mushroom sausage cream sauce on slabs of the other loaf of the Forkish bread, which was a popular lunch yesterday. The other lb is going in the freezer for T-day.
tl;dr? When you have sausage in the house, good things happen.
An update on the lemon pepper Slender James: they are fine. The flavor is pretty good, though adding that much pepper changed the texture of the sausage so it was less unctuous, and more like a summer sausage texture. Also, they dried in a way that made them look, frankly, ashy. I need to make some regular ones soon, before Heather, the HBIC at our local, gets mad at me.