Homemade Lamb Merguez: Spicy + Aromatic Sausage From North Africa

In today's video we explore how to make your very own homemade lamb merguez sausage. I really enjoy making my own sausage, and I'm happy to show you that it's less complicated than you might think. And what's more, once you understand my basic approach to making sausage, it is easy to approach any other sausage project with the same formula. That means you can jump around the globe via your kitchen, sampling all the great minced meat treats that various countries and culture have to offer. In the past I've made Bratwursts...today it's Merguez...perhaps tomorrow we will take on Northern Thai Sausage!

I start the video by explaining how to adjust or convert a recipe. I do this because I will often start with a whole cut of meat and that weight will have a natural degree of variation that doesn't match a recipe. Or in the case of the scenario is the video, I had a lot of scraps to use and therefore I wanted to bump up the recipe without simply doubling it. But if you don't need to adjust your recipe and plan to start with the exact measurement I provide, feel free to skip ahead to the recipe listed further below.

The formula for converting a recipe is simple but it works much better when working in weights. It is:
New / Old
Take the new weight for a key ingredient. In this case it was the amount of lamb meat. The original recipe called for 1.4 kilos, but I wanted to adjust it for 2 kilos of lamb meat. Dividing 2 by 1.4 gave us a conversion factor of 1.4. And that is the number we use to multiply all the other ingredients by in the recipe to give us a converted recipe. This formula can work in both directions, adjusting recipes to smaller amounts. For example, sometimes I get recipes from old jobs that are good but scaled for large volumes. To adjust this to a more home-kitchen size, I can simply take one of the ingredients, use the same formula and adjust accordingly. Just something for you to consider that might make your life easier.

LAMB MERGUEZ RECIPE

Lamb:
2 k lean lamb meat
600 g beef or lamb fat

Spices+Seasoning
8.5 g cumin
8.5 g coriander
8.5 g fennel seeds
20 g paprika
4 g cayenne
35 g garlic
100 g harissa
1 tablespoon pomegranate molasses
30 g tomato paste
65 g salt
52 g milk powder
115 g ice water