Month: April 2016

Rye bread – nailed it!

The Talking Squid wishes to remind you that what you see on the Google+ page is only the beginning of the blog post…
Yesterday, at last, I finally managed to make a rye bread that  I was completely happy with. I just followed the recipe in “Food DIY” exactly. No experimenting with turning it back into a sourdough. This one was made with dried yeast. 

Why is “Save the Deli” in the picture, though? It’s because it is mentioned in Tim Hayward’s book, where he talks about how a good rye bread really shouldn’t be something that you have to suffer to eat and digest. It’s a good read, too, although the earlier chapters are rather like a sequence of magazine articles gathered together to make a book. It has, quite unsurprisingly, a lot of Yiddish words sprinkled through the text, a thing that used to annoy me when I was reading Playboy in 1970. [Yes, I read it. The other people on the ship used to complain that I kept it for too long. I suspect some of them were only looking at the pictures.] Fortunately, there is a glossary at the end of “Save the Deli”, translating these words, and describing in enticing detail what the foods they refer to are like. It’s just a shame I didn’t realise that until I got to the end of the book…

In case you wondered, “Cooking from Cyprus” is there because there are some dishes in it that I want to make soon. Cypriot food is good, especially some of the cured meats, and I was thinking that it has been ages since I had a good slice or three of lountza…
Here is a gratuitous picture of a slice of the bread with a sardine on it. I’m the only one in my family who actually likes sardines. And besides, I have run out of pastrami, which I suppose was bound to happen, given the arrival of a suitable rye bread…

Merguez sausages

It’s that picture of sausage casings that I posted a couple of days ago, all over again!

I had intended to write this much sooner, but there was a pause while I sorted out a fairly major computer problem. I may have created all sorts of new problems by doing that, of course, but they have not happened yet…

There are quite a few Merguez sausage recipes online, and the usual misery-guts commenters asking why on earth would you bother, as you can buy cheap ones in shops? If that is the sort of thing you think, you are reading the wrong pages.


When home made food is done properly, it is better than the factory stuff. Take, for example, sausages. I just looked at a pack of quite good commercial ones. As well as meat, 85%, they contain calcium carbonate (chalk), brown sugar, sodium metabisulphite, and a few other mysterious things. Mine contain meat, herbs and spices. /rant



This is the larger size of sausage stuffer for our mincer, with some nicely soaked hog casing threaded on it. Merguez is often made with the smaller sheep casings, but I don’t currently have any of those.
Having mixed the minced Welsh lamb breast and shoulder with a good amount of my home made harissa paste, and some salt, I’ve started stuffing. I’m glad to say that I seem to be getting back into the way of doing this, as there are hardly any air spaces in this one. Bacteria can breed in the spaces, you see.
It always amazes me how strong the casings are, when I twist them into links like this. Beautiful little things, aren’t they? I believe I will have a couple for tea tonight.
This, however, is annoying. There’s always some of the meat left in the mincer that will not emerge because it has passed the end of the spiral thing that moves it along. Having thought about this, I think I can solve it next time, by putting something like stale bread through the mincer to push it out.

In the meantime, though, the solution is simple enough. One simply makes the remaining meat into a patty, and fries it. This is as good a way as any of finding out how the sausages are going to taste.

Here we go…

Yes, it was delicious. Really delicious.