Breakfast

In my earlier days of cooking I focused on one chef in particular – Emeril Lagasse. His recipes often called for Italian, Spanish chorizo or Andouille sausages, and oftentimes I could only obtain Italian sausages at more upmarket grocers like Village Grocer or B.I.G. Even then, there was only one type available, and I couldn’t differentiate between the sweet or hot varieties the recipes called for. Fast forward many years later, when looking at the basic sausage sauce recipe from one of my pizza cookbooks, I decided to make my own Italian sausages.

I’ve made quite a few recipes by Emeril Lagasse which called for andouille sausages. I have never seen halal andouille in any of the upmarket grocers or deli stores in KL, and even when an ad for a non-halal deli pops up in my feed (need to do better, Facebook -_-) I rarely see andouille in their product list. So I usually would substitute with other sausages, such as chorizo (hard to find), Italian or any other smoked sausage.

At one point I wanted to try making my own andouille sausages. I’ve looked up a possible recipe from Emeril. Rudy even got me a gorgeous Zwilling Twin Smoker set. I was pretty new to cooking at the time, and was still very wary about taking liberties and modifying recipes, so my inability to find a substitute for file powder called for in the recipe basically ground the project to a halt. Almost seven years later, having more cooking experience and exposure to recipes from so many more chefs and home cooks, I finally got around to making my own andouille, based on this really inspiring recipe by Hank Shaw.