Hedgehog

I've been making my own sausage for a year now, and I think I've gotten good enough at it to share the technique.


Part 1 - grinding meat
1. Buy Pork "Picnic" cuts, or pork butts on sale
2. Get a real sturdy grinder (electric recommended)
3. Get a HUGE plastic punch bowl from the dollar store
4. Cut the meat into strips off the bone before grinding
5. Feed into grinder, keeing fingers out of the hopper. Use the wooden stuffer thingie.
6. When done grinding, you have ground pork. Good work, you are 1/3 of the way there.

Part 2 - seasoning
This is the fun part. Knock yourself out figuring out what you like to season sausage with. There's only three mandatory ingredients. Salt, Pepper, and Sage. I recommend fresh sage leaves and put it in the food processor until it's powder. Use sea salt or kosher salt instead of table salt and it'll help homogenize the ground pork when you stuff it.

I like making a base mix of Sage, salt, black pepper, thyme, and minced onion. Mix it into the ground pork by hand (ewww! maybe use rubber gloves).

Other viable ingredients I have tried are:
Honey
Molasses
Red Pepper
Chili powder
Garlic powder
Liquid Smoke
Beer
Hoisin sauce
Coriander
Ginger
Fennel seeds
Paprika
Oregano
Red pepper
Nutmeg

and whatever else you like is fair game

Make a small patty and fry it up to taste it. Re-season, and re-sample until you have something you like.

Part III - Stuffing (optional)
Okay, you can simply take what you made and wrap it up in wax paper if you like patties. I like links, and that means stuffing it into a casing.

Harsh reality must be faced here. Casings are pig intestines. Try hard to get over it. Buy them at the local butcher shop. You can use collagen casings, but they are brittle and just aren't stretchy enough to do the job right.

1. Take the casings out of the packet (ewww!)
2. Soak them in water
3. Take one out
4. There is a little plastic ring. Put it inside the opening of the casing so it holds it open. Stretch it to make it fit. You'll be surprised how strong these things are to be so thin.
5. CRITICAL STEP: Run water from the faucet all the way thru the casing. This is like filling a water ballon except the end is open and the water runs out. You do this to lubricate the casing and also to get all the knots and twists out of it. Trust me, it's important.
6. Put the stuffer nozzle on the grinder. Grease it up with a thin layer of shortening if you like.
7. Put the end of the casing over the end of the nozzle and scrunch the casing up onto the nozzle until you reach the end. Leave a few inches hanging off the end.
8. Put the meat back into the grinder and start it up
9. When meat starts squeezing into the casing instead of air, tie a knot in the end of the casing.

OK, this is gross to watch if you're squeamish, I know. There's an old saying about those who love the law and love sausage shouldn't watch either being made. It's probably true.

10. Let the meat run into the casing and start pulling the rolled up casing off the end of the nozzle. Let it make a long coil of sausage. You can also make links by twisting the casing after a certain length feeds off the nozzle. Just remember to tie off the twists with some twine before cutting them off the coil. I prefer to just make coils. They grill up better and you can cut them into links after cooking.

11. When you reach the end of a casing, leave enough casing empty to tie a knot in the end. Start up a new casing until you finish all of the ground meat.

Congratulations! You made it to the end. If you can manage to do this, you can pat yourself on the back (wash your porky hands first, though).

At this point, you should probably just burn down your house and collect the insurance rather than try to clean the kitchen yourself.

However you choose to do it, you will have a bunch of really tasty sausage that has no nitrates or filler and was much cheaper than what you buy in the store.*

*provided that you made more than a couple of pounds. The bigger the batch, the more cost-effective it will be. Get a big freezer and do this twice a year is my recommendation.

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Hedgehog

Let me also add that I made bratwurst for July 4's cookout this year.

Did you know that German Bratwurst is seasoned with only:

Coriander
Ginger
Nutmeg, and, optionally
Beer?

None of those (aside from beer) is a German ingredient. How strange.

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Hedgehog

Just to add...the brats got the ultimate compliment at July 4...all eaten inside of an hour, before the burgers, even.

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Chingal0

Excellent walkthrough.. have you tried seafood sausage? It's kind of interesting.

At school, we had this sausage stuffer and on the side it had the companies name gracing the side. DICK it read in huge engraved letters. So many bad jokes.

Anyways, uh, I just wanted to talk about the dick.

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castex

I'm definitely going to try this, and soon. France is notably lacking in the tasty banger department, so this could be a godsend. Thanks too for the highly entertaining directions

Hedgehog

I've done pork, and a mix of "freezer leavin's" consisting of pork, beef and chicken. I'd like to try turkey and chicken soon, with the trick being that you HAVE to add fat to lean meats (probably lard or shortening), or it will be absysmally dry. I'll report back when I do it.

Haven't tried seafood sausage yet, but it sounds interesting. My fiancee is Asian and loves her fish, so I might try it sometime.

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