Homemade mici - romanian garlicky meat open sausages
These garlicky delicious meaty open homemade sausages are such a Romanian staple and no BBQ will ever happen without them. With just a few ingredients, they are to die for especially when served hot with mustard and a cold, cold beer! Perfect for any type of weather.
Place the meat into a bowl, you can give it another whizz into the food processor for a double grinding but don’t worry if you don’t fancy doing this. There is another solution - extra mixing/kneading.
In a larger mug, I mix the beef stock with beer, soda bicarbonate, spices, salt pepper and give it a good stir until the salt has dissolved entirely.
Add this liquid mixture to the meat and mix really well until the mixture becomes almost a paste. And this is your double grinding technique
You can now work with a dash of oil or water to form the sausages into their shapes. A little touch of oil takes you a long way so just grease your palms with a tiny dash of oil or, use a bit of water. I always use oil. It helps with preventing them from sticking. Place all on a plate or a little tray, something that can easily be placed in the fridge.
Transfer the open sausages to the fridge to rest for 2 to 4 hours but you can leave them overnight too, it’s absolutely okay.
Place them onto a hot, hot grill or in a hot pan and cook them on each side ( x 2) for no longer than 4 min.
Mici must be served with mustard and a super cold glass of beer. HEA VEN!
Notes
Preparing the homemade stock:
To make the beef or lamb stock at home I always choose oxtail or lamb neck and boil these for a good few hours. They can be made separate or mixed it really does not matter.
Meat Combination Ratio
If you don’t eat pork replaced this with lamb but if you do, feel free to mix all three types of meat to a ratio of 2:1:1 meaning 2 parts of beef, 1 part pork and 1 lamb. It’s a sensational one.
Needless to say that I always add chilli flakes to spice things up a little or serve them with nice 'n spicy mustard.
Very Important points/steps! -for the best results
Resting time it’s an important step as they will soak in all the spices and all flavours will blend in nicely.
Mixing the meat is crucial - this needs mixing by hand until resembles a paste
Grilling the mici
Mici can be grilled, ideally on the charcoal grill but a gas or electric grill would do the job too. They can be even fried in a pan or baked in the oven.
These need to be grilled on quick-fire. High temperature is another secret to PERFECT MICI and turned a couple of times - this is for the best-looking mici (see picture below) but also for delivering some really nice mouthwatering and very juicy mici 'little ones' ;-)
To check whether Mici or the little ones are cooked to perfection while on the grill tap them harder with a fork or the tongs and if they are bouncy, they are ready.