Duck Sausages with Blue Cheese, Walnuts and Pears

I made these sausages with my friend Matt a few months ago, when he came to visit from Toronto with his family, and I thought they would make a good first post. I've made sausages with Matt several times, and he shares my enthusiasm for intestine and other interesting animal parts, such a fried cartilage and mystery goo.

For this particular round, we decided to finally experiment with making duck sausages, after having talked about it often. Being new to the duck sausage game, we asked the butcher, who told us to use half duck and half beef, since duck meat is so fatty. So we had him bone some duck thighs for us, and we then ground it with approximately as much extra lean beef. 

Notice the slightly undercooked center.

Here's a list of the ingredients:

– Half boned duck thighs
– Half extra lean beef
– Crumbled blue cheese
– Chopped walnuts
– Chopped pears
– A splash of Sortilège (a Canadian liqueur made from whiskey and maple syrup), just for fun
– Salt and pepper

The walnut and pear pieces kept getting stuck in the grinder during the stuffing process, and every so often we had to disassemble it and clean out the mess of duck fat and mashed up pears and nuts. In order to avoid this, chopping them as finely as possible is clearly a good idea.

The combination of blue cheese, walnuts and pears with the dark and flavorful duck meat turned out delicious, and the sausages had exactly the right meat to fat ratio. The blue cheese, especially, complemented the meat well, and added a nice melted-cheese texture. We were not sure if we could taste the Sortilège, aside from it maybe adding a certain sweetness.

There was enough left over to put a few in the freezer, and subsequent experiments have revealed that they're at their best if not fried for too long so as to remain slightly rare in the center, as can be seen in the picture above.

The serious sausage-lover will notice something a little off about this picture: Clearly the two other sausages are made from pork and not duck. The explanation is that we forgot to take pictures the first time around, and that this is from a later sampling of the freezer's many different kinds of sausage, including the one from this post. Serving up four different kinds of home-made sausage impresses the hell out of the girls, by the way.