I’m completely clueless about caillettes, (pronounced ky-yet). But I’m up for strange and unfamiliar food. Well, that’s another story. These pork and chard sausages are specialties from the Ardèche region in South-Central France. By all accounts, caillettes are slightly flattened, souped-up meatballs dating back to the 16th century.
In fact, caillettes take on the shape of a big Easter egg. The recipe comes from David Lebovitz in My Paris Kitchen. The key ingredients consist of: chicken liver, onion, garlic, ground pork, Swiss chard, allspice and herbs. However, in France you wrap the pork and chard sausage in cail fat to hold it together. Here, we have to make do with thin slices of bacon.
The trouble is when I chop all the ingredients in the food processor, they don’t quite come together. To rescue that, I have to strain out a good amount of liquid with a mesh strainer. Then refrigerate the sausage mix before I can shape it into what resembles a caille or baby quail. Since the only thing oval I can find in my kitchen is a soup ladle, I use that as a mold to squeeze the sausage mixture together. And wrap bacon slices around the caillettes — like mummies.
Next, off they went into the oven. The caillette stayed together in one piece. Finally, I let out a sigh of relief. After 35 minutes in the oven, the bacon did not turn golden brown as I expected. I did not want to overcook the sausages, since they were almost fully cooked before the baking. So I took the caillettes out of the oven. Paused, and eventually, deployed yet another gadget for the rescue — a blow torch.
For dinner, I served the pork and chard sausages with some roasted potatoes and asparagus. Strangely enough, my husband asked whether there was liver in the caillettes. And he liked them!
To see other versions of caillettes from our friends at Cook-the-Book-Fridays, click here.
6 Comments
Mardi (eat. live. travel. write.)
March 29, 2019 at 3:10 pmGlad you enjoyed this. I posted a link to a recipe for a more traditional version in my post (where the pork is not cooked twice which think I might enjoy a lot more!).
Chez Nana
March 29, 2019 at 3:29 pmI was really looking forward to make this recipe but unfortunately it just didn’t work for me. I do enjoy all the ingredients, I just don’t know what the problem was.
Katie from ProfWhoCooks
March 30, 2019 at 9:33 amThat’s a really good idea with the soup ladle! I’m going to keep that in mind! I, too, had trouble with the bacon not browning and did consider my kitchen torch. I ended up putting them under the broiler for a quick minute and it worked out. They look good, Shirley! How was the texture? I skipped browning the pork and very much enjoyed these.
Shirley@EverOpenSauce
March 31, 2019 at 4:09 pmThe texture of the sausage is very much like that of a soft meat ball. In other words, there is not a lot of textural contrasts.
betsy
March 31, 2019 at 10:55 amMy bacon didn’t brown either, but I didn’t have the other issues you had. I liked the flavors, but found it too much work for the end result. Was yours too wet after cooking the chard? I use a potato ricer to squeeze the liquid out of cooked greens (read it in Cook’s Illustrated). It works great.
Shirley@EverOpenSauce
March 31, 2019 at 4:07 pmThat’s a wonderful idea to use a potato ricer to squeeze out unwanted liquid from whatever. Thanks, Betsy.