ithaca brunch sausage
Ithaca, NY. One grey October Sunday morning in 1999, I was shockingly out of supplies for breakfast. After an hour or so of mental dry-spinning - a consequence of my yawny hungry-ness - I fetched my coat and went down the hill to see where I’d find some food. First I meandered through the whole downtown without much success. When I finally entered the DeWitt mall, the cafe was just about to open, and completely empty.
Cafe DeWitt lies right across the world-famous Moosewood restaurant. I used to visit the mall for other reasons than breakfast: around the corner is the Oasis, an organic food store with a large selection of vegetables, grains, teas and, of course, the Natural Brew Draft Rootbeer, Outrageous Ginger, Vanilla Creme Soda and Ginseng Cola (sweet but heavenly, and: one cannot drink wine all the time). Inside the mall is the Bookery, a used-and-rare-books store where I found, amongst others, a used copy of Frank Hubbard’s Three centuries of harpsichord making for 20 bucks.
What I did not know was that Cafe DeWitt is the favorite churchgoers’ meeting point for brunch. I sat down, a very friendly waiter took my order, Farmer’s breakfast, and when I looked again, the place was suddenly ab-so-lu-tely full of people. I was lucky to have chosen a small table off the main track.
The breakfast was delicious - a more than worthy reward for my earlier procrastination: rosemary-fried potatoes, amazing sourdough bread (well, and egg, of course) and their Apple-Chicken sausage. I noted in my diary that this sausage made the impression of a Weisswurst in terms of juiciness and texture, while it also contained bits of apple and an occasional bit of sweet corn.
Last week I had a length of sausage casing left, and so I improvised a Farmer’s Breakfast Chicken Sausage à la Me. My apple chicken sausages are spicier than those from Cafe DeWitt.
I mince a pound of chicken bits with some fat and a large hot red pepper with the seeds in the fine meat grinder. Ideally, one ought to buy a true second-hand sausage grinder, but there’s no space left in our kitchen for stuff like that. I add:
Dried sage, a cup full of frozen corn, salt, pepper. While this combo turns around in my bread kneader, I saute a chopped clove of garlic and a diced apple in some goose fat. As soon as the garlic gets soft, I add this to the sausage mix, including the cooking fat. Then I pour enough ice-cold water into the still turning chicken-goo to make a smooth paste. I mix the mix some more. A fry-check in the goose fat pan shows whether I have to add more salt or other spices.
Finally the chicken goes into the casings (I have a filling funnel for this task that attaches to my meat grinder). While I shape the sausages, I heat up a big pan with water. The sausages are, in the usual manner, cooked at a bare simmer, in order to prevent them from bursting open. They can be eaten in various ways: still hot; dismantled, sliced and fried; grilled. The lucky survivors are kept in the freezer for later use.
March 7, 2008 at 1:30 am
Your stories, your blog, and your cooking experiments have made me avoid my “real-work-with-a-deadline” for 2 hours this evening. Thanks. Your posts are fun and informative.