Chicken Soup Sausage

Links of raw sausage

“It tastes like chicken”- how any times have you heard that? The implication of course is that chicken is so tasteless that any bland tasting meat (rabbit, squab, etc) could be easily substituted for it. Just take a look at the chicken sausages that populate the supermarket with their array of strong seasonings (basil garlic, Gouda apple, teriyaki). This runs counter to the principle of a good chicken soup. A good soup tastes definitively like chicken. My question was could I create a sausage that tasted that much like chicken that there would be no mistake about what it was made from.

I started off by breaking down a chicken and using the bones to make my chicken stock. That was reduced to the point that it was barely liquid. I then chilled it until it became like well set jello before adding it to ground chicken (both white and dark meat) and well chilled schmaltz.

I re-chilled the meat mixture and used my sausage stuffer attachment to make 7 inch links. [See my post on merguez for photos of sausage stuffing.] Chicken is tricky stuff to keep without spoiling so you want to cook it right away. A low heat (300F) oven for about an hour until the sausage reached 160F cooks it enough to keep but still allows for creative reheating or grilling.

The result was an incredibly chicken-ey chicken sausage that was as good on a roll as it was with the morning eggs. Of course if you wanted to go the extra mile you could cut it up into soup- but that might be a step too far.