Chorizo del diablo.

Tacos (huevos con chorizo)–one of many uses. [click to enlarge]

Pseudo recipe:
4.25 pounds pork shoulder and pork belly mix
1 onion and 3 cloves garlic (ground with meat)
4 teaspoons kosher salt (= one heaping tablespoon)
1 tablespoon whole black pepper, ground
1 heaping teaspoon whole cumin, ground
1 heaping teaspoon Mexican oregano
1 teaspoon coriander seeds, ground
1 heaping teaspoon paprika
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1/2 teaspoon cayenne
7 ounce can of Herdez Salsa Ranchera (the jarred stuff is not as good)

Notes: Ground once through a 3/16th die. I probably forgot some of the spices I put in, and the quantities may be off, but for the love of Pete, this is good stuff. The addition of vinegar would add a nice balance.

Sausagepalooza!

We recently put the meat grinder through its maiden voyage at the House. TimmyB decided to have hamburgers for lunch yesterday. The grind was initially perfect, but we made one assumption that was wrong: We thought that lots of meat would be trapped in the spindle (and that is why it was backing up, as you can see it begins to do in the video). To remedy this, we put the ground meat back through to press the unground meat out (and when that did not work, we put in some hamburger buns, which also did not work). The real problem lay in that some connective membrane (the kind you find between fat and muscle) had blocked the 3/16″ holes in the plate, sort of like putting saran wrap over the holes, so the meat really had nowhere to go but backwards. Once we removed the obstructing membrane, the grinder worked great, but by that point we had mashed most of the meat to a pulp and had a bunch of bread mixed in. Lesson learned. Perhaps we need to be more careful in cubing the meat; perhaps tightening the lockring more securely would have prevented the problem from happening in the first place, because the cutting knife is supposed to rub quite hard against the mating plate. More as we experiment. For the record, the burgers were great! We only used some olive oil, salt and pepper to season the meat.

Below is a teaser thumbnail…
Click (here), or on the thumbnail, to view the video.