Tongue Sausages

[tristar]

Hi everybody, I have been lurking in the background for some months reading all the posts and have a question for our more learned members. Not eating pork, I have been searching for a substitute to include in my sausages to give the juiciness which I am yearning, I am presently working in Gabon, Africa and have just eaten Ox Tongue, it struck me that the texture of the tongue may make a good substitute for pork in the many recipes which contain it, it is in addition very tender and doesn't have any overpowering flavour, and more importantly is available to me in Indonesia where I live!

Has anybody actually tried tounge in a sausage recipe and if so what were the results?



Best Regards to all, Richard

[othmar]

Pork in sausages is hard to replace with other meats such thong. Pork will give the sausage the moisture and the pork fat holds the flavour together. Meat by itself does not hold flavour from spices and such well.

What you can try is to lower the pork content down and substitute with thong. If you can't eat pork for health or religious reasons then you can substitute the pork with thong but in that case I would ad beef fat. The only problem with beef fat is that it has a very strong flavour and thus may make the sausage taste beefy.

I recomend that you try small batches of sausages with different replaceres and see how you like it. The beauty of making you own sausages and other food is that you can experiment that is what our forefathers have done and ultimatly gave us so many different kinds of sausages.

[tristar]

Thanks Othmar,

From what I can find on the internet tongue has already between 15% and 30% fat! so I can't imagine needing more than that, I would plan to grind the skin of the tongue with the meat to add texture and use a garlic/herb seasoning mix to overcome the blandness of the meat, I can't wait to get home and try it

Unfortunately it will be some weeks before that happens but if it is successful I will post the results here!

Anybody else out there have any experience of tongue sausages?

[othmar]

Thanks Othmar,

From what I can find on the internet tongue has already between 15% and 30% fat! so I can't imagine needing more than that, I would plan to grind the skin of the tongue with the meat to add texture and use a garlic/herb seasoning mix to overcome the blandness of the meat, I can't wait to get home and try it

Unfortunately it will be some weeks before that happens but if it is successful I will post the results here!

Anybody else out there have any experience of tongue sausages?

That sounds good to me. Just be careful with the skin on the thong because it very though more so than pork skin. If you just grind (mince) the thong with the skin on, it is possible that you are left with though bits and pices in the sausage.

Thong is very easy to skin. Put it into boiling water for two to three minutes and you will be able to peel the skin right off.

Good luck and yes please let me, us, know how it went.

[tristar]

If anybody is following this topic and are interested, I have found the following link which has a recipe for German Grits which uses tongue and heart, also has a number of other useful looking recipes, isn't the internet a wonderful thing!

http://www.ext.nodak.edu/extpubs/yf/foods/he176w.htm

Thank you North Dakota State University!

Regards,
Richard
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