This is exciting! I've been working on a series of 7 sausages for a Sausagefest 2024 party I'm having soon. So far, I've been making great progress on sausages (#1 - St. Rose Chorizo, #2 - Central TX BBQ, #3 - Hot Links, #6 - Jalapeno Cheddar), and then I got stuck on #4 - Louisiana Boudin, which was recommended by
indaswamp
and I was really excited about. But after 4 attempts/iterations, I think I've finally made progress!
First off, some history.
I followed the original recipe posted by
73saint
and ran into a problem: the resulting product tasted delicious, but it couldn't be grilled. If you cut the links, grilling will cause the contents to shoot out. If you tie them down and then try to grill, you still can't slice them as you would normal sausage. Without a solid bind, the casings were rubbery and unpleasant to eat.
I've since learned that you don't grill them and eat the casings, but instead folks often instead suck or squeeze the contents out and discard the casings. This is suboptimal for me for a few reasons:
indaswamp
recommended the Best Stop Crawfish Boudin as a solid representative Boudin. I noticed they mentioned in the description that it can be grilled, so I took the plunge and spent $40 for 3 links.
The product arrived with dry ice in a mini cooler.
Do you notice how the ends have a bit of trailing casing? I wondered why as I pan simmered them for a quick test:
To my disappointment, the Boudin immediately expanded, shooting out of the casing. I believe this is the reason that they have 'tails' on their links: so that when it expands while cooking it doesn't shoot out like this. Undeterred, I tied up both ends to get a good sear and that worked. However, the Boudin could still not be sliced (it appeared as my image before). And no matter how sharp your knife is, it'll leave a mess on the blade:
Thinking about why this happened, I felt like this was due to the amount of non-meat product in the recipe. Four cups of cooked rice (700g), 400g fresh vegetables, and very very little fat (only the butter used to sauté the vegetables). I tried another batch, increasing the binders (adding NFDM and tried to reduce the amount of water, but still I failed). I then did more research and found a Mariansky book: Making Healthy Sausages that seemed to specialize in making sausages with low meat content (vegetarian sausages) or low fat content. I ordered it, and when I arrived, I made two shrimp sausages, referencing slightly different recipe in his book, similar to his fish sausage recipe, but replacing his ground fish with half chopped shrimp (emulating crawfish) and half ground shrimp. One recipe from the book had 20% pork fat, and one had fat replacer (konjac flour : xanthan gum : microcrystalline cellulose in a 2:3:4 ratio). I was blown away by the results!
Despite using coarse chopped product, I had a great bind! Texture was spot on! The top is pork fat, and the bottom with the fat replacer. I was expecting the fat replacer to taste awful, rubbery and synthetic, but it actually tasted GOOD. Not as good as pork fat, but it bound so much better!
(As an aside, I think the fish sausage was a bit bland on the flavor side. I bet it'd to much better with some more spices or a stronger fish like salmon).
Armed with this knowledge, I proceeded with a revised version of the recipe. The goal was to reduce water content, reduce non-meat product, increase bind, and increase fat.
To start, I did a deep analysis of the reference Best Stop Crawfish Boudin, as it performed slightly better than my first attempt in terms of bind. I used the ingredients list and order of ingredients to derive my recipe.
In short, I added pork fat, added cure #1 (since I added pork fat and
Cajuneric
did in his boudin recipe), added both soy isolate, phosphate, egg white, NFDM, and potato starch (throwing the kitchen sink in terms of binders), reducing rice to 200g, and using all dehydrated ingredients.
This achieved the texture I wanted, but it was rather salty. I think this is simply because my salt:non salt ratio got out of what due to reducing substantially the amount of non-salt product and by adding cure#1. I revised the recipe accordingly, and will post on the next post since this one is getting long...
indaswamp
and I was really excited about. But after 4 attempts/iterations, I think I've finally made progress!First off, some history.
I followed the original recipe posted by
73saint
and ran into a problem: the resulting product tasted delicious, but it couldn't be grilled. If you cut the links, grilling will cause the contents to shoot out. If you tie them down and then try to grill, you still can't slice them as you would normal sausage. Without a solid bind, the casings were rubbery and unpleasant to eat.
I've since learned that you don't grill them and eat the casings, but instead folks often instead suck or squeeze the contents out and discard the casings. This is suboptimal for me for a few reasons:
- My friends aren't the most adventurous, and will likely eschew the need to eat the sausage this way (and possibly allude to the empty casings being similar to other ... things best not mentioned in a food context).
- This is a Sausagefest, and arguably the Louisiana Crawfish Boudin is unlike any other of the 10 or so boudin sausages I've seen on meatsandsausages.com. LA shrimp/crawfish boudin not very sausage-like in that respect (more like risotto placed into a sausage casing).
- I want to put the best possible sausage forward, and I really like the taste of well cooked casings. I want to be able to eat the casing, and I also want to be able to slice into it if I want, like a typical sausage. Even better if it's a choice, where I can choose to also eat it the traditional way.
indaswamp
recommended the Best Stop Crawfish Boudin as a solid representative Boudin. I noticed they mentioned in the description that it can be grilled, so I took the plunge and spent $40 for 3 links.The product arrived with dry ice in a mini cooler.
Do you notice how the ends have a bit of trailing casing? I wondered why as I pan simmered them for a quick test:
To my disappointment, the Boudin immediately expanded, shooting out of the casing. I believe this is the reason that they have 'tails' on their links: so that when it expands while cooking it doesn't shoot out like this. Undeterred, I tied up both ends to get a good sear and that worked. However, the Boudin could still not be sliced (it appeared as my image before). And no matter how sharp your knife is, it'll leave a mess on the blade:
Thinking about why this happened, I felt like this was due to the amount of non-meat product in the recipe. Four cups of cooked rice (700g), 400g fresh vegetables, and very very little fat (only the butter used to sauté the vegetables). I tried another batch, increasing the binders (adding NFDM and tried to reduce the amount of water, but still I failed). I then did more research and found a Mariansky book: Making Healthy Sausages that seemed to specialize in making sausages with low meat content (vegetarian sausages) or low fat content. I ordered it, and when I arrived, I made two shrimp sausages, referencing slightly different recipe in his book, similar to his fish sausage recipe, but replacing his ground fish with half chopped shrimp (emulating crawfish) and half ground shrimp. One recipe from the book had 20% pork fat, and one had fat replacer (konjac flour : xanthan gum : microcrystalline cellulose in a 2:3:4 ratio). I was blown away by the results!
Despite using coarse chopped product, I had a great bind! Texture was spot on! The top is pork fat, and the bottom with the fat replacer. I was expecting the fat replacer to taste awful, rubbery and synthetic, but it actually tasted GOOD. Not as good as pork fat, but it bound so much better!
(As an aside, I think the fish sausage was a bit bland on the flavor side. I bet it'd to much better with some more spices or a stronger fish like salmon).
Armed with this knowledge, I proceeded with a revised version of the recipe. The goal was to reduce water content, reduce non-meat product, increase bind, and increase fat.
To start, I did a deep analysis of the reference Best Stop Crawfish Boudin, as it performed slightly better than my first attempt in terms of bind. I used the ingredients list and order of ingredients to derive my recipe.
In short, I added pork fat, added cure #1 (since I added pork fat and
Cajuneric
did in his boudin recipe), added both soy isolate, phosphate, egg white, NFDM, and potato starch (throwing the kitchen sink in terms of binders), reducing rice to 200g, and using all dehydrated ingredients.This achieved the texture I wanted, but it was rather salty. I think this is simply because my salt:non salt ratio got out of what due to reducing substantially the amount of non-salt product and by adding cure#1. I revised the recipe accordingly, and will post on the next post since this one is getting long...
Last edited:
