Kimchi Dogs

Stole this picture from a friend... Thanks friend.

So you are probably thinking that by saying "Kimchi Dog" I mean a sausage with some kimchi piled on top. Well, I do mean that. But I also mean an actual homemade sausage containing kimchi (among other things).

I started with some meats. For my fatty part I used some pork belly. I cube it up and partially freeze so the fat doesn't smear. Along with the 1 pound of pork belly, I used 3 pounds of pork shoulder and 1 pound of ground chuck. I put the meats through the grinder twice, first through a coarse plate.

Something about cubes of belly is very purty.

Before the second grinding I added my kimchi. 

Kimchi and Gochujang. A recipe for goodness.

I put about a pound of kimchi in...

...and ground the whole mess through a fine plate. At this point I added about a cup of gochujang and my secret blend of sausage fixins' (I don't think we need to get into the mad science of sausage-ology in this post, if you are interested ask and I will do a post on some of the science I use). The whole mess went into Lur-lenore's (my stand mixer) ample belly to mix for 5 minutes.

To pack my sausage into casings I used a relatively new addition to my kitchen (that I have been utterly pleased with). Here we have LEM Products 5 pound stainless steal vertical stuffer. I have a very sturdy meat grinder that has stuffing capability, but I have found that the high horsepower of a good meat grinder does not make the ideal stuffer. The mechanical action of the screw powered machine tends to smear the fat and mangle the texture of certain sausage recipes. The manual, hand cranked action of the below pictured piece of finely tuned hardware eliminates this problem

I stuffed the kimchi sausage paste into 32mm (I think) edible collagen casings. I let them go in a very slow oven until a probe thermometer read 150 deg and then cold smoked them for a couple hours at one of my Brosepher's (friend's) homes.

When they were done, I grabbed one up and sliced off some hunks for tasting. Wouldn't you know it? The pound of kimchi and cup of gochujang that I thought would be more than sufficient to lend a hearty punch of flavor kind of left me wanting for more. Although the sausages were very good, I think I could have easily doubled the amounts of both ingredients for a more assertive kimchi/gochujang flavor. Aside from this we had a very successful experiment. The texture was perfect, they were moist, and the light smoke worked wonderfully.

Some close associates and I served them up on some sturdy rolls with some additional kimchi and a slathering of a 50/50 mix of gochujang and ketchup. I think the crowd was pleased.

This is one of those experiments that I think I am going to strive to refine. I think this has the possibility to become my signature sausage. Like I said before, next time I really want to step up the kimchi flavor and increase the heat levels significantly. Aside from eating the kimchi sausages on a bun, I could see them being delicious chopped up and crisped as part of a kimchi fried rice recipe.

Anyhow, I am on a mean sausage making bender ever since I got my LEM stuffer so I would expect more sausage posts in the future. I have a feeling that a fair to middlin' subset of my readership is interested in "the craft." But if I get droll, by all means, let me know.