Homemade Portuguese Sausage

Portuguese

Story by Becky Speere | Photography by Tori Speere

I am frantic. It’s eight in the morning, day two of lessons on how to make smoked meat and sausage, and I’m trying to locate sausage casings for the photo shoot for this story.

Yesterday I showed Lehia Apana, our managing editor (and resident badass; see story on page 28), and her husband, Brad Bayless, how to slice wild-boar meat into strips to marinate in a secret sauce. (The recipe, shared by rock-star chef Sheldon Simeon, owner of Tin Roof and Lineage restaurants, you’ll find at the end of this story.) Then we diced ten pounds of the meat for Portuguese sausage and mixed it with garlic and spices. As my knife glided through the shoulder, I raved, “The fat in this pig is beautiful, Lehia. It’s pearly white, nothing like the commercial pork found in grocery stores.” She nodded, “That’s what our pig-trapper friend said when he butchered it. Probably really good meat from a steady diet of nuts from the old macadamia-nut orchards surrounding us.”

I grew up in Hilo, and although I never ventured into pig hunting, it was practically a rite of passage for the boys in our family. My brother Thomas recalled navigating the rainforest: “There were no trails. We crossed streams and climbed over ancient, fallen trees draped in moss. We ran down slippery gullies, where old hāpu‘u [tree ferns] stood like sentinels in dripping greenness. Men and boys scrambled after wet dogs barking in the distance. The pigs were skillfully butchered in the forest and placed into homemade burlap backpacks. Everything was orchestrated from the moment you got up—at four in the morning.”

The experience is not for the faint of heart, but then, neither is my hunt for elusive sausage casings. I’ve called all the usual suppliers on Maui, but strangely, the only answer I hear is, “Sorry. We’re sold out.” In desperation, I text Chef Taylor Ponte at The Mill House, hoping he may have a small amount. I plead, “All I need is enough to make ten pounds of Portuguese sausage.” Miraculously, he responds, “Come now.” My story will go on with the last necessary ingredient!

I race to Waikapū, pick up the casings, and arrive on time at Lehia and Brad’s home. Lehia jogs up to greet me, her ponytail bobbing and swaying in the breeze, her body language exuding excitement. As I step out of the car, Lehia grins and gestures with both hands, as if introducing me to a new friend. “And here is our new smoker!” Five days earlier, when she shared that she and Brad had trapped a couple of feral pigs that had been tearing up their small farm, I said, “Hey, let’s make some smoked meat and sausage!”

I suggested they come to my house (in the boonies), where I have a smoker, or perhaps Brad could make one out of tin roofing. Instead, she called her father, Ricky Apana, and lickety-split, he arrived with a smoker from Uncle Ron in the back of his truck, along with two stacks of dried kiawe wood and a bin of kiawe charcoal. Inside, the heavy-duty metal box has racks and holes in all the right places. “In its original life it was a control box for street lights, I think,” says Lehia, as she reads some scribbled handwriting on the metal. “My uncle turned it into a smoker, but doesn’t use it anymore, so he said, ‘Take it.’”

As we clean and assemble my LEM-brand sausage stuffer, I realize that the threaded connector that secures the stuffing tube is missing. Without it, filling the sausages will be almost impossible. Brad dashes to the rescue! Well, really he dashes to the shed, comes back with the PVC fitting from a lawn sprinkler, scrubs it clean and manages to jury-rig the connection. We flush the white, luminescent pig casings with fresh water, and let them soak while we pack the first batch of meat for the sausage snuggly into the expresser canister. I untangle one of the casings and try to stretch it over the tube, but it’s too small.  We switch to a narrower tube. Voila! Carefully, to avoid tearing the delicate casing, I slide it onto the tube. Brad then turns the canister’s crank slowly, and the diced meat begins to fill the casing, until a link a foot long extends from the machine. I show Brad and Lehia how to roll the sausage segments—one forward, the next backward—to create separate links. They move into position, taking turns cranking the handle, pressing out the meat, saying, “Forward . . . backward . . . forward. . . .”

We giggle over our short-term memory failures: “Which way did the last link go?”

Out in the backyard, the kiawe fire burns, smoke pouring from the vents. Brad sets off with loppers in hand to gather a few branches from a guava tree to add to the fire for a sweet and fruity smoked finish. When he returns, I say, “Let’s make sure the fire’s not too hot—no more than two hundred degrees. We want to smoke the meat for at least two hours and we don’t want to dry it out.”

We tend the fire, tossing in green guava branches, creating billowing white clouds of smoke. I’m transported to my childhood. Waiting for the smoked meats to be done was always the hardest part.

Simeon-family Smoked Meat

“Growing up on the Big Island of Hawai‘i, this family recipe has always been a very traditional part of our Hawai‘i food culture. Enjoy!”
—Sheldon Simeon, chef/owner of Lineage Restaurant in Wailea, and Tin Roof Maui in Kahului

Prep Time: 15 minutes to prepare the marinade, 3–5 days to marinate, then 2–3 hours to smoke the meat.

INGREDIENTS

• 10 lb. pork butt or wild boar meat, cut into 2x2x12-inch strips
• 1 qt. Aloha Brand Shoyu
• 4 c. white sugar
• ½ c. sesame oil
• 3 pc. Hawaiian chili pepper
• 10 garlic cloves, smashed
• Fist-sized piece of ginger, smashed
• 3 stalks of green onion with bottoms, smashed

DIRECTIONS Marinate 3–5 days. Smoke with kiawe (mesquite) and guava branches (if available) on low heat (150–200°) 2–3 hours. Slice and fry in a little oil.

Mahalo to Chef Sheldon Simeon for sharing his recipe for marinated smoked meat.

Homemade Portuguese Sausage Recipe

Prep time: Day 1: Two hours to dice meat + overnight marination
Day 2: One to two hours to stuff sausage meat into casings. Smoke for
2-3 hours at 150-200 degrees.

Yield: approximately 13 pounds of sausage links

Ingredients:

• 10 lbs. boneless pork butt, diced to ¼ inch (must fit easily through sausage-filler tube)
• 1 package of casings* for sausage (it will be more than you will need, so if you want to double or even triple the recipe, your family and friends will love you).

Marinade:

• 1/3 c. Hawaiian salt
• 3 c. cold water
• ¼ c. sherry wine
• 3 lg. garlic cloves, minced
• 3 Tbsp. sugar
• 1-3 Hawaiian chili pepper, minced finely, to taste
• 1 & ½ Tbsp. paprika
• 2 Tbsp., or to taste, Rami Brand garam masala

Method: Mix marinade ingredients well and add diced pork. Coat thoroughly. Refrigerate overnight tossing and mixing at least twice. Next day, cook a little in a frying pan with a little oil to taste seasonings. Adjust, if necessary. Stuff by hand, or use a mechanical stuffer. I use the LEM Brand** hand crank unit.

*Casings: Available at Uncle Louie’s Sausage Company in Kahului. Call ahead to confirm in-stock supply. 190 Alamaha Street, Unit E, (808) 871-7544.

** LEM Products, digital catalog, (877) 336-5895, or Amazon.com.