I’ve been looking for a good recipe for chicken sausage and back in October, I made one that was devised by a friend and was flavoured with thyme, lemon and garlic having been inspired by Chef Thomas Keller’s famous recipe for chicken brine. I was so confident that it would be great that I even posted a ‘coming soon’ photo. After all, what’s not to like? They’re a classic combination. Well, somewhat embarrassingly, the family didn’t like it. I’m sure others will though and the recipe’s here for people who want to try it… …and I encourage you to do so.

But, for me, it was back to the drawing board. I had a play around with a couple of mixes using herbs and finally settled on making a chicken sausage with spring onion/scallion. I’ve been busy with other things so it’s taken until now to get the recipe to a stage where I feel it’s fit to share.

The recipe uses chicken thighs. In the early trials, I cooked the skin from the thighs until crisp and ground this with the meat. It was good and I’ll no doubt incorporate it in a sausage in the future but this time I’ve settled on a recipe that uses only the thigh meat and the fat that’s attached to it. This has the advantage of allowing me to use boneless skinless thighs which saves a lot of work.

To each 1 kg of thigh meat I added:

60 gm Rusk
90 gm Chicken stock*
80 gm Spring onion/scallion
13.5 gm Salt
2 gm Ground white pepper
1.1 gm Ground coriander
1.1 gm Ground ginger
1.1 gm Ground nutmeg

*Reduce 225 gm homemade chicken stock to 90 gm by boiling it. At a push, use commercial stock making allowance for its salt content or water. Whichever you choose, ensure that it is cold.

Method:

1. Cut the chicken into pieces suitable for your mincer/grinder and weigh out the other ingredients. Mix the salt and spices together.
2. Mince/grind the chicken. I did this with a Kenwood chef mixer using the mincer attachment. I used the plate with 4.5mm holes. Had I used my larger mincer I would have made a coarser mix using a #6 plate.
3. Put the spices on top of the meat, then the rusk. Pour over the stock and mix it all well for a few minutes. You can use a food mixer (not a processor) like the Kenwood to do this if you want.
4. When it starts to get sticky add the spring onion (scallion) and mix it in.
5. Fill it into presoaked 24/26 sheep’s casings; it will take approx 3.4m of casing per kilogram of sausage. Link and put them into the fridge overnight to bloom.