Sausage Making at Home.

I have a difficult time eating food when they are grease or oily to taste.  So it was easy for me to take the plunge into making my own sausage.   Knowing what I do and don’t like has guided me to an easy starting point for creating or cooking up a storm! 

I have an old fashion meat grinder that I have just in case, but the best tool is my Kitchaid mixer and all the wonderful attachments it has.  The attachments for this chore are the meat grinder and the sausage stuffer, both items are readily available and at Amazon.com, usually at a discount.

Now there has been a bit of information gathering before I took the plunge and the aid of another set of hands to make the job go more smoothly.  In addition I purchased 2 books on making sausage and in the future will make a cold smoker to create the illusive summer sausage I grew up with.  But for now fresh sausage is the target.

A couple of things that helped organize the process; get a good recipe book for a base line, make sure you have all the tools, figure out how much the recipe will make/you want and put a good shopping list together.

I thought that this would be a disastrous undertaking and an extreme mess.  But here is the process for the day.   At noon we headed off to the market to acquire fresh meat to work with.  We got a picnic shoulder and 90% pre ground beef for our first round (now that we have a good time reference and what we need to create low fat sausage we will get a good cut of beef and grind it ourselves to know exactly what we want).  Once home we removed the skin, fat and silver skin from the pork.  Cut the pork into pieces small enough to fit into the feeder tube of the attachments.  Before we went too much further we got the spices and garlic ready for use, put all the equipment together and or ready to use, and put the casings in water.  This made it quick for us to move thru the rest of the process.  We used 32mm casings which are nice but just a tad bit big for regular sausage; the 21mm would have been a better choice.  We then moved on to cutting and weighing as we had decided to make two different sausages one a Greek orange and the other a traditional Cuban sausage.  The Greek was a beef and pork combination and as the name states it had a whole large orange in it.  We blended all the spices together with the wine and combined with both of the meats.  Once well mixed by hand we took a large spoonful and tossed it into a suite pan to test our concoction.  Voila!  It is an awesome sausage, at this point we have already decided to add more orange the next time and make it for our Thanksgiving dinner party. (We couldn’t find a large orange so we used two medium sized, needed one more)  So on to the next step – STUFFING.  Since neither of us had any experience at any of this we used books as a reference.  We soaked the casings in water before using; this is a very good thing just not too long as the casings get delicate the longer they are in the water.  We attempted our hands at long sausage, 6” sausages – long ones twisted every 6”, and one we could coil up.

Next we did a Traditional Cuban sausage with annatto seed and Mexican oregano; this is a 100% pork sausage ground to a large size grind.  As we did with the last, we blended everything together and then took a really big spoonful and tossed it into a pan for testing.  Once again – SUCCESS, the recipe gave us the option of using paprika or annatto and we choose the annatto as the spice was a Latin spice and we wanted to stay true to ethnicity.  Here we decided for next time is to do half and half the annatto and paprika.  This time when stuffing we made 4” links and a couple of long ones, this is when we found out  that we had left the casings in the water too long and as a result we had to make a few patties out of is.

At this point it is about 4 pm and we have opened a bottle of sparkling wine in honor of our success.  Our next venture will be before the holidays and Italian sausage will be on the list to accomplish.  Know it takes the two of us, have all the mis en plas done, and two bowls, one for ice water and the other to put the meat into as we do the grinding.   We are excited and looking forward to another day of sausage making and the enjoyment of the sausage for dinner that night.