Sausage

We have finally gotten around to making some sausage from the remaining bits of Oreo. This was our second attempt at sausage making and was far more successful than our first. In the end we made around 60lbs of sausage including: Southern pork, kielbasa, linguica, garlic, two kinds of salami, chorizo, andouille, and some others I am forgetting. A friend was good enough to lend us her kitchen aide with a grinder and stuffer attachment and while I liked the way it worked Rosie and I would still like to get a manual stuffer to go along with our manual grinders. One thing we kind of knew but was re-enforced was that our kitchen is way too small for the amount of people and projects we tend to have here. On the sausage making night we had 10-12 people in the house with about half that number trying to work in the kitchen at one time, we made it work but I think this summer I will try to get started on our kitchen expansion. Over all the night was a success and I think every one had a good time despite the tight working quarters.

In the future we will need to see about prepping some of the meat prior to the stuffing day, we had to spend a lot of time boning the meat and getting it in to bags to semi-freeze (makes grinding work better) and because of that I was unable to do any smoking on the day we did the stuffing. Also some of the sausages seemed to be a little dry and in the future I may want to go with a higher fat content, we where using 1 lb of fat to every 5 lbs of meat. One thing that we figured out that really helped with loading the casing onto the stuffer tips was putting the casing on a pair of chopsticks while it was staged in t some cold water, the two chopsticks allowed us to quickly load the casing onto a tip without loosing the ends or tearing the casing. Kudos to Sean for coming up with that one. Like most of our meat processing parties it was a long day and we where still stuffing at 2am when we finally called it a night, maybe a sausage making weekend may be better next time rather than a sausage making day.

Breakfast Sausages - Piggy fulfills her contract

After slaughtering the piggy I saved the small intestines and rinsed them out and left them in salt water in the fridge. Last night I rinsed them out a bit more and decided to make some breakfast sausages.

Recipe:

2 lbs of pork (I used stew meat) frozen
1/2 cup pork fat (bacon grease)
fresh thyme
fresh sage
small Rosie handful of salt
ground white peppercorn
sprinkle of ground cloves
sprinkle of red pepper

Grind pork in fine ground setting (we actually used the bread crumb setting in our hand crack grinder since it was available and Jed had used it for Happy Circle and Dots). Mix all other ingredients with pork... watch out, your hands will freeze. Then I rinsed out some of the casing some more to take off all salt and any mucus that might still linger. Since I don't have a stuffer I just took the top part of my turkey baster off and used the tube to stuff the casing. I pushed the casing onto the turkey baster tube and when I reached the end I tied a knot. I then started stuffing the mixture into the casing. Jed helped by poking the casing once in a while (at every link) with a needle to let air escape and to completely fill in the sausage. I twisted the link about every 3 inches. The recipe originally said 4 ft of casing, but it turned out being over 8 ft and I still have a bit left over. I was kind of done making sausage after a while. Recipe also says to put it in the fridge for a few hours to over night. To use w/i three days or to freeze and use w/i 3 months. I cooked some this morning and it was a success. Jed and I really liked the flavor and the sausages cooked down a bit smaller. The juices ran clear and the whole house smelled great.

We still have casings left over so I was going to see about either making some beef and potato sausages or make some chitterlings for Jed so that he can try them out. We'll keep you guys posted.