SAUSAGE - Bulk and Links
Do you like to keep unnecessary fat, salt or additives out of your diet and still enjoy a variety of meat with flavors and seasonings suited to your individual tastes? Would you like to have the freshest ground meat possible without any fillers, dyes or other unknown things added? Do you enjoy selecting your own spices and herbs? Sausage may the answer. Every country has some form of sausage. It can be served for breakfast lunch or dinner. It is a wonderful main course and can be used in soups, sandwiches or just for a snack. Sausage can be boiled, fried, baked, smoked or grilled. Pork is the most popular sausage but beef, chicken, lamb, veal and seafood all make excellent sausage. Sausage can be in several forms like fresh, smoked or dry cured like salami. Even hot dogs are a sausage! This section will focus on fresh sausage. And will be expanded from time to time.
Making your own sausage is easier than you think. You can start off making bulk sausage formed into loafs, patties or logs. All you need are a few pounds of ground pork, some spices and a few recipes. You will have sausage in less than 1 hour. This will give you the chance to test out a few recipes in small batches to find out what you like. If you want to go one step further, you can explore stuffing fresh sausage into casings.
Practice kitchen food handling safety by doing the following:
Wash your hands often.
Use rubber gloves when handling meat.
Start with clean utensils and equipment.
Keep all meats in the refrigerator when not processing them.
Don’t eat raw meat to test seasonings.
Follow preparation and rinsing instructions for the specific casings that you select to use.
Grinding your own meats requires only a food processor or meat grinder. Meats are prepared by trimming fat, removing bone, veins or skin then cutting into cubes or strips for grinding. Chilling the meat until it is just icy makes grinding easier. I pre-measure everything for a recipe before I grind. I like to sprinkle some of the spices on the meat before it is ground. When grinding is complete, I mix in the remaining spices and liquid(s) then mix in a large bowl using rubber gloves. Now you can fry a sample patty and adjust seasonings if necessary.
With this mixer attachment, I can grind 10 pounds of pork in no time. My mixer is one of the old 300 watt models of Kitchen Aid. I use a speed setting of 4, and when my meats are cut and properly chilled for grinding, I can grind at a rate of 1 pound per minute.
Bulk sausage or formed patties can be packaged and frozen for later use like sandwiches or pizza toppings etc. Click here to jump over to the Fatties page where there are instructions for making logs.
Here is my set-up for stuffing. I prefer the natural casings which are packaged either in solution or in salt. Both kinds require rinsing and the salt packed ones need some additional time in warm water, changed once or twice to clean and soften them up. The inside of the casing requires rinsing also, just slip one end over a faucet like you were making a water balloon and rinse out. There are several choices for synthetic casings, I just don't care for their texture.
These are the end results.
