Recipe: Ronnie’s award-winning fuet with hazelnut
Ronnie Poeste, lecturer at svo Vakopleiding Food and sausage maker at deworstmaker.nl, created this recipe for the international professional competition of the Confrerie de Chevaliers du Goûte-Andouille de Jargeau. He became Dutch champion with it. And who knows, perhaps you will too, because the recipe is simply included in the latest book by Meneer Wateetons: Over Charcuterie.
Of the forms of charcuterie discussed in this book, sausage is technically perhaps the most difficult. When making dry sausage, we therefore deploy quite a battalion of our safety weapons: chilling, salt, nitrite, acid through fermentation, drying and sometimes smoking. Compare that with a cured ham, where salt and drying are essentially all you need, or a pâté, where you simply kill all the microbes in the oven. But don’t worry. Many sausage makers have gone before you, and the author of this piece has a 0% kill rate to his name. As far as he knows, at least. He never opens his email. One useful tip: read the book first — and specifically the chapter on dry sausage.
Preparation
- Soak the casings and dissolve the starter culture in a little water. Dissolve the mold in plenty of lukewarm water.
- Grind or crush all the spices as desired. Keep the curing salt and vitamin C as separate as possible. Set the hazelnuts aside.
- Cut the pork shoulder and bacon into coarse pieces, and season with salt and spices. Keep the vitamin C and starter culture separate for now.
- Place the hazelnuts in a bag. Crush them mostly by hitting the bag. The mixture can contain both fine crumbs and larger pieces.
- Grind the seasoned pork using the medium-coarse plate of the meat grinder.
- Mix the ground meat very thoroughly with the hazelnuts, adding the starter culture and vitamin C while mixing.
- Fill the casing using a stuffing horn or sausage stuffer. Make sausages of approximately 25 centimetres.
- Prick out any air bubbles.
- Tie into long sausages. At one end, tie the sausage closed with a knot. At the other end, tie a knot with a loop.
- Prick out the air bubbles again.
- Pass the sausages through the water mixture containing the mold.
- Ferment for approximately 48 hours at a humidity of 85% and 22°C.
- The pH must have dropped below 5.3.
- Dry at 15°C and approximately 75% humidity until around 1/3 of the weight has been lost.
- The sausages can hang undisturbed for about 3 weeks. This gives the mold time to develop and add flavor to your fuet.
Charcuterie photography: Saskia Lelieveld
Title: Over Charcuterie
Author: Meneer Wateetons
Price: €31,99
Publisher: Carrera Culinair
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