This was my first attempt at doing a 100% lamb sausage: using only lamb meat, fat, and casings. I've thought about doing this for a while, but lamb casings cost about twice as much as hog casings, so they're a little price-prohibitive. I'm not sure if it's because there's extra effort required to clean lamb casings, or if the fact that since they're so much smaller than hog casings, a small quantity of lamb casings requires the same amount of effort as twice the amount of hog casings.
That being said, these lamb casings were a joy to work with. It might be odd to be so excited over intestinal tubing, but these were very easy to fill, didn't burst easily, and had a delicious "snap" to them after being fried in a skillet. Each one plumped up to the size of a hot dog, so they were also very easy to portion out.
I chose a Merguez-style sausage, as I would be working with pure lamb fat. Lamb fat, like lamb, has a stronger flavor than pork, and many recipes recommend using pork fat to cut the lamb meat for a milder product. Merguez is a style of sausage from North Africa (Tunisia and Morocco), although equally found in French cuisine due to some cultural exchange during the Imperial expansion of France.
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The spices for Merguez included some hot chilies, but also plenty of aromatic spices, like fennel, coriander, cumin, cinnamon, and fresh galic and cilantro. I thought if the lamb was gamey, the aromatic spices would counter the strong flavor of the meat. I started with a whole lamb shoulder, which gave me plenty of meat and fat to use in making this sausage. Originally I held back on most of the fat, but after frying up a test patty, I found the sausage to be incredibly mild and deliciously lamby: not gamey or strong at all. After that I added in more of the fat until I had the moist texture I was looking for.
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Going into this recipe, I was unsure about a few things: 1.) how mild or gamey the sausage might be, 2.) if too much lamb fat would make the sausage unpleasant, 3.) how the casings would hold up. But this was a great experience from start to finish and I'm excited to work with more lamb sausages in the future. Part of me was thinking a lamb sausage with spinach and feta would be great in a pita bread with tzatziki. I need to remember, however, that the smaller diameter of these sausages does mean they can take less "extras," like a larger diameter pork sausage. The last thing I'd want would be big bites of spinach and feta with no meat in the middle of the sausage.
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