This year for our annual "Boudin Making Day" with the usual crowd of ol' boys, I was unable to attend. A stomach virus kept me "commode bound" while all my buddies spent the day drinking and having a ball at our good friend, Sam's outdoor kitchen and smoke shack. I sweet-talked my friend, "Mr. Ed" into taking a few pictures, but he aint the "foodie" that I am, but Bless his heart he did his best under the inebriating circumstances.
25 lbs. of pork, 8 lbs. of liver, my Cajun seasoning to taste, 6 bell peppers and a qt. bag of chopped green onion tops, plus a qt. bag of chopped parsley. Stir till cooked.
Ya place the meat mixture in a pan to cool and while it's cooling.......
You fry up a batch of "cracklins". Cracklins are cubes of fresh skin on belly bacon meat. They are fried in their own lard till they float, taken out of the oil, cooled, then twice fried a few seconds to blister the skin.These hard cooking, hard drinking country boys dove into them after the first fryin' on accounta they couldn't wait.
This is a wonderful ole Cajun gentleman known as "Bebe" pronounced "Baybay". Mr. Ed kept saying "Baybay" with a deep Maurice Chevalier accent.
Here Bebe and Ed are showing off their wonderful fried "bacony" cracklins. Think they been drinkin'???
Our buddy Steve enjoying his!
Now, about the boudin:
Once the meat cools, ya gotta mix in cooked rice. I figure one cup of rice for 1 lb. of meat, but the guys just cooked a 20 lb. sack, figuring close enough.
Once you get everything mixed together well, you push it down into the sausage stuffer, while one of your buddies handles the end where the mixture comes out into the pork casing. There's a knack for getting this done right, but with a roomful of Cajuns who've been doin' this for years, they got it down to a science. The end result is this pile of boudin, which was twisted into links and weighed in at a lil over 80 lbs. Half of it went into the smoker, and the rest was left cooked, but unsmoked. We feel certain that the finished product could compete with the best in any contest. It was amazin'. Of course how how could it not be; it was my recipe and seasoning.
I am told that shortly before taking this picture is when they decided to sample the quart of "shine" somebody brought. That makes it the last picture they remembered to take. I was kinda comforted by the fact that they forgot to watch the rice real close and quit taking pictures, cuz it makes me feel like they coulda used my help, so I was not forgot. By noon I was ready to face the world and try to go on over to see how things were going, but these early rizin' country boys were already finished and when I stepped out the door to go meet 'em in my Jeep, they were pullin' in the driveway. Oh well, at least they showed up with my yearly supply of this wonderful Cajun tradition.
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