Another Myth Gone
How does one, I wondered, how does one make Fleischwurst or Fleischkaese in a West London home?
Consultation with a few suggested that one does not. Apparently, a special process is required, das kuttern (bowl cutting?), which cannot be done at home.
Nonsense. I am of course not alone; www.chefkoch.de provides a forum dedicated to making of sausages and related produce, and provides extensive discussion about the making of Fleischkaese at home. Nothing to be excited about. The bottom line is quite simple, really.
Day before: get some ice cubes in the freezer. You need about 150ml of water, frozen into small-ish cubes, per kilo sausage meat.
On the day: For a 1 kg Fleischkaese (fits a standard square cake tin), you need about 1/3 lean beef, 1/3 fat pork, and about 1/3 mystery ingredient. For the mystery ingredient, chose cured smoked pork for Fleischkaese, pork or chicken liver for Leberkaese, or maybe even a mix of things including potato pieces or red peppers or mushrooms or…. well, you get the picture.
(If you uses salty ingredients in the sausage meat, remember to reduce the salt content in the herbs and spices mix accordingly.)
Cut the meat into thin stripes, place on a tray, and into the freezer. Do something else for two to three hours; you want the meat very stiff and very cold, but not actually frozen.
Use some of the waiting time to prepare the herbs mix. For 1 kg sausage meat, try this for a basis:
2 tbl spoons curing salt (less if salty meat is included), 1 tea spoon freshly ground black pepper, 1/2 tea spoon each of ground coriander, ground nutmeg, sweet red peppers. 1 1/2 tea spoon of crushed yellow mustard seeds.
Run the meat through your mincer, using the finest setting. Chase with a small onion and one clove of garlic. Add one egg (optional, apparently, but I wasn’t brave enough to leave it out).
Make snow: run your ice cubes through the blender until you have nice snow. Work quickly; you want fine grain snow but no water.
Now, still working quickly, run everything together through a blender at high speed. Using your hands is inferior as the hands warm the mix and the mix chills your hands to the bone (yes, I tried it); I suggest using a kitchen aid of some sort. Fast-running blade preferred; this is the closest you will get to the mysterious process of kuttern.
Oil your baking tin, fill in the sausage meat, pack it nice and firm. Cover with kitchen foil and bake at 150 C for 75 minutes. Remove the cover and allow for another 10 minutes.
Eat hot, cold, luke warm. On bread, with potatoes, with and without mustard, …