Kids Make Kielbasa

First step to sausage: grinding pork

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

Our food appreciation classes continue on their world culinary tour, landing this week in Northern Europe and specifically Poland. And what would dinner in Poland be without kielbasa--Polish for sausage.

Making sausage is one sure way to get kids' attention. In short, it's a blast, from cutting and grinding the meat, to adding herbs and spices, squishing everything between your fingers and finally stuffing the mix into hog casings.

There's a hygiene lesson here, of course. We teach the kids to wash their hands frequently when handling raw meat and not to touch anything else--like tabletops, tools, door handles--before washing to avoid cross-contamination.

Normally we don't use electric gadgets in our classes. I like the kids to do everything by hand, like cooks would have done in the old days. They get a better sense of their ingredients and the process that way. But I do not own a manual meat grinder, so in this case we used my electric grinder/stuffer. As you might imagine, the kids were fighting for their chance to push the meat through the grinder every step of the way.

Traditional kielbasa are normally cold-smoked, but that wouldn't work for our classes. So we'll just make do with fresh kielbasa, which are also delicious, especially when you've just made them yourself with the finest quality pork and seasonings.

I've adjusted this recipe to call for two pounds of meat--plenty for the average family. In fact, you might want to freeze some for future use. The original formula called for a certain amount of fat back. But fat back--literally, fat from the back of the pig--is getting more and more difficult to find. So I simply look for a fatty piece of pork shoulder (aka pork butt). You want plenty of fat in your sausage or it will taste dry.

Also, when making sausage, you want to keep your cutting blades and meat well chilled whenever they are not in use. Things can get sloppy as the fat warms.

Is this fun, or what?

First, slice two pounds of fatty pork shoulder--the best you can find--into 1-inch dice (or a little larger). Run the meat through your grinder and into a mixing bowl using the largest cutting die you have. Then add 1/3 cup cold, 1 1/3 tablespoons finely chopped garlic, 2/3 tablespoon kosher salt, 1 1/3 teaspoons dried marjoram, 1 1/3 teaspoons ground black pepper, 2/3 teaspoon dried mustard, 1/3 teaspoon ground coriander. Mix well (this is where the kids got to squish everything together with their hands.)

Run the mix through the grinder two more times using successively smaller die, or until the mix is rather finely ground to your taste. At this point, you can taste for seasoning by frying some of your mix in a skillet. If necessary, adjust the seasoning, then stuff the mix into hog casings, twisting into individual links about five inches long. (Hog casings can be purchased online, or often from your neighborhood butcher. We got our at the Eastern Market on Capitol Hill, where a couple of old-fashioned butchers sell all sorts of pork products.)

Stuffing sausages works best with two people, one to push the meat through the stuffer and the other to handle the links. Try to pack the meat so there are no air pockets, but these are almost unavoidable. When you've finished stuffing, prick the sausages all over with a needle or poultry skewer (there is a special tool made for this). Doing this give the air a chance to escape and helps prevent the sausages from bursting open when you cook them.

We're saving ours for the parents night dinner in May. Stay tuned!

What's for Breakfast: Sausage and Egg Sandwich

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

Kids seem to like these egg and sausage sandwiches. Finally, I broke down and tried one myself.

I've noticed before, the breakfast sausage is bland and spicy at the same time. Meaning, there's not much seasoning except what seems to be red pepper flakes. I'm surprised the kids aren't put off by it.

These days the eggs are not scrambled in a factory hundreds of miles away and shipped frozen. They're scrambled in the school kitchen from liquid eggs. They could use a little more salt. But the future of school food is no salt. In fact, even the USDA is at a loss to figure how schools will cut the salt in cafeteria food by half over the next 10 years. Does that mean school food will be healthier but flavorless?

Fitting perfectly in that category is this English muffin. It has no flavor at all. None.

What's for Breakfast: Finger Food

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

One of the more amusing (or not) aspects of school meals is watching kids try to cope with actually eating the foods they are served with the available plastic cutlery, which does not include either a knife or a fork.

Using their "spork"--or combination spoon and fork--kids often will attempt to shovel unwieldy foods directly into their mouth. But just as often they dispense with the niceties of cutlery altogether and just go at food with their hands.

I've seen them scoop up mashed potatoes with their hands and plaster it on so-called Salisbury steak. I've seen them pick the noodles and cheese out of their spinach lasagna and eat it with their fingers. This morning, they were devising ways to consume a crusty waffle (reheated from frozen) and breakfast patty of turkey sausage.

As you can see in the above photo, one girl's solution was to make a kind of sandwich out of the waffle and the sausage. She proceeded to munch away at the waffle until it matched up perfectly with the sausage.


The brown stuff in the lower left was advertised at the Chartwells website as a "warm cinnamon apple topping" for the waffle. But I did not see any kids deploying it as such. Mostly it went uneaten and was thrown in the trash.

My daughter, who arrived a little later than most of the other kids, waited about 10 minutes for the kitchen to prepare a fresh batch of turkey sausage. But when she tasted it, she threw it back onto the tray. "That's nasty," she said.

This highly processed patty is colored to look like a traditional pork sausage, but the flavor is entirely missing. In fact, it is somewhat over seasoned with red pepper flakes, but otherwise is totally bland, as if it hadn't been salted at all. So between the soggy cardboard-like texture and spicy flavorlessness, this sausage is a turnoff. Although I must say most of the kids ate it anyway and went back for seconds.

What's for Breakfast: Egg & Sausage Sandwich

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

How does this breakfast look to you?

Scrambled eggs and a sausage patty on an English muffin, along with a carton of orange juice and some canned pears.

Schools constantly complain they don't have enough money to make better food. So why do they scoop the canned pears into a plastic cup they have to purchase, then pay to have hauled away when it's thrown in the trash?

Guidelines proposed by the USDA would restrict the amount of juice schools can serve as a replacement for whole fruit. What's wrong with juice? For one, it's missing all the fiber you get eating whole fruit. Also, juice is just the concentrated sugar--or fructose--from whole fruit. Kids don't need to be consuming all that sugar.

The eggs are scrambled from large cartons of liquid eggs delivered to the school kitchen. That's a big improvement over the eggs that were pre-scrambled in a factory and shipped to the schools frozen.

Unfortunately, the sausage patty doesn't have a lot of flavor. But that may be a permanent feature of school food. Those same proposed USDA guidelines call for schools to cut back on salt content by half.

Also, notice the kids in D.C. are still getting their food on disposable Styrofoam trays. Even at my daughter's school, where they have a commercial dishwasher, they're still using disposable Styrofoam trays.

The "Healthy Schools Act" approved by the D.C. Council last year calls on schools to replace Styrofoam with a more sustainable alternative, but only over a period of years.

This breakfast looks simple enough. But there's actually a lot going on here.

What's for Breakfast: Turkey Sausage Muffin

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Since my daughter transferred to a different elementary school this year, I've had a much tougher time getting my hands on ingredient information for the meals. Typically they're pasted onto the shipping boxes that the frozen meal components arrive in. It was pretty easy to dive into the dumpster outside the school and retrieve them. I saved a whole box full at home, giving me a reference to use in these posts.

Under the "Healthy Schools Act" approved last spring by the D.C. Council, the public schools were required to post meal ingredients where the public could easily see them. School officials said the ingredients would be part of a new website. When the website did not appear for the beginning of school in the fall, school officials said it would be ready sometime in November. Now it's January, a new year is upon us, and still no website, still no ingredient information.

Thus, I regret I cannot tell you what is in this turkey sausage. Presumably its turkey and a number of additives to make it taste like sausage, processed in some distant food factory and shipped to the District of Columbia to be re-heated in the school's steamer or convection oven.

The most unfortunate part is the cheese, which is sprinkled onto the muffin than melted. It doesn't look especially appetizing, does it?

What's for Breakfast: Pizza!

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Parents may hate to hear it, but pizza is the all time favorite food of kids at school. But pizza for breakfast? Is that a good idea?

Like most meal items served in District of Columbia schools, it arrives frozen from Schwan's Food Service, Inc., in Marshall, MN. Schwan's Food Service calls this product "Tony's Breakfast Bagel." It's not clear who Tony is, or why he insists on calling this product a "bagel" when the label says it's covered with "pizza" sauce and even to the untrained eye is clearly a pizza.

Is Tony embarassed to be serving pizza to children for breakfast? (I would print the ingredient list here, but it's too long, full of things like sodium citrate, and sodium aluminum phosphate and sodium tripolyphosphate and magnesium oxide, and ferric orthophosphate. So many sodiums and phosphates....)

But clearly this item is designed for children. Because right on the box label it says that one 2.6-ounce "breakfast bagel" provides one ounce "equivalent meat/meat alternate and 1 serving of bread alternate for the Child Nutrition Meal Pattern Requirements." For a nutrtionist back at a computer trying to figure out what to order for school breakfasts, this sort of information from a food processor in Minnesota makes the job much easier.

The instructions on the package advise cooking the "breakfast bagel" for eight to 10 minutes in a convection oven set to 375 degrees. But at our school, it's placed in a commercial steamer and heated while still inside its individual plastic package. It comes to the serving line piping hot. (The temperature in Washington hit 88 degrees the day this was served, a record.)


This is what it looks like after the wrapper's removed, to be washed down with chocolate milk and orange juice.

This little girl was using the plastic wrapper to hold the pizza. How else do you eat it?

But my daughter declared, "This stuff is nasty." She was referring to the turkey "sausage" topping on the pizza. "It tastes raw," she said. So she picked it all off. The other kids started removing their sausage, too.