Merguez
By Tom // Posted 3 November, 2010 in: Recipes
In one of my first posts on this blog I declared my love for harissa, the spicy North African red pepper spread. Since then I have strayed a bit: our jar of harissa run out, I began to flirt with other spicy red pastes — I was not immune the the trendy allure of sriracha. But when Martha made hlelem recently, I was reminded of my former love. With sausage on the brain lately, a freshly-opened jar of harissa had me thinking one thing: merguez.
A sausage popular in North Africa and Europe, merguez is usually made with lamb. This makes sense – there are a lot of pastoralists raising flocks of sheep in North Africa most of whom are Muslim – pork is neither practical nor permitted. But since I’m free of religious obligations or cultural sensitivity, pork was definitely an option and one too delicious to ignore. The argument could be made that a pork sausage is not really merguez, but I say as long as there’s harissa I’ll not worry about fine distinctions.
As I was searching the Internet for recipes, I was disappointed to see that many contain only a small amount of harissa: 3 tablespoons per 3# of meat, for example. To make up for this deficiency most recipes add other spices (cayenne, coriander, cumin, sumac, etc.). This might be traditional, but I didn’t see how adding additional spices would help; the flavor of the harissa ought to be flavor enough. My final recipe was:
- 1# 5 oz boneless pork shoulder
- 10 g garlic (3 cloves)
- 50 g harissa
- 15 g salt
If harissa is the only thing a sausage has to lean on in terms of flavor, the success of the recipe obviously depends on the quality of the harissa. Someday I will make my own harissa (and you can be sure you’ll be hearing about it here), but with a jar already open I used Mustapha’s. This is, after all, the harissa I fell in love with; I haven’t sampled other brands very widely.
I served the sausage with a cous cous-based taboulli.
7 comments | Harissa, North Africa, Pork, Sausage, Spicy
This entry was posted by Tom on Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010 at 6:58 am and is filed under Recipes. You can subscribe to responses to this entry via RSS.
I am afraid that with that much salt it would not make a heart healthy serving! 2500 mg day is the limit!
They did come out a little salty although they were very much to my taste. Keep in mind that the recipe yielded six sausages, so each one would have 2500 mg of salt. Sounds like a lot when you put it that way!
This looks so good. I wish I could have come over to eat with you! I have some Harissa sitting in my frig, waiting for me to use it. Lately I am quite into the trendy sriracha mayo, it’s so good!
Sigh. Yet another reason why I need to get into sausage making. I wish I wasn’t on such a meatball bender at the moment. Although, I suppose I could make these in meatball form and eat it with something crunchy to replace the nice snap of a sausage casing.
Funny you should mention that, Brian: as I was stuffing I ran out of casings and so now have six merguez meatballs in the freezer.
Dear Tom,
I am sure that they are tasty but I personally think that the lamb flavor profile is pretty essential to Merguez sausage. I would also guess that since lamb is generally leaner than pork the the lamb based merquez would be quite a bit leaner too.
If you run this again with ground lamb let us know the results. (OK and maybe sneak in wee bit of pork fat as long as it is for personal consumption).
Dale: I think I will try a version with lamb and also with sumac, a flavoring I really like and saw listed on the Wikipedia page. The pork was mostly an issue of buying meat before making a final sausage decision.