Making Sausages

A couple of weeks ago, we had a steer homekilled.  I have so many aspects of this to write about there will be a heap of posts regarding this.

Today, however, I'm writing about sausages.  I've just spent two days making sausages, hating sausages, eating test patties and breaking things in my kitchen while making sausages. I've gotten through less than a quarter of the meat.

I'm running on about half the sleep I should have had in the last few days and have been collapsing into bed with everything hurting.  It actually became quite a vicious cycle, everything hurt to the point where I couldn't get comfortable enough to sleep, exhausted as I was, but I needed the sleep to refresh everything that hurt.

Anyway, enough of my whining.

I first tried making sausages several years ago when I found out that I was gluten intolerant.  I think it was about 7 or 8 years ago and gluten-free options were a bit thin on the ground.  I found a mincer with sausage attachment on trade me, I also found hog casing sausage skins on trade me so I started making my own gluten-free sausages.

Before becoming gluten-free, I didn't eat many sausages. In my time I've met far too many butchers who wouldn't eat their own sausages and have a tendency to tell the tales of what's really in them when they've had a few drinks.  Problem was, once I was unable to eat something then I really started to crave it.

Some of the sausages I made were lovely, some were dreadful and barely edible.  I had no idea where to even think about finding fresh pork fat - it's not something you see in the supermarket after all - so I did end up with some horribly dry attempts at sausages.  I found a few recipes that worked fine without fat - Cumberland sausages and Boudin Blanc were my favourites.  Although, one lesson I did learn is that most dry sausages taste just fine in lashings of gravy.

I threw away the last of my sausage casings about the time we moved to the farm.  They'd been in the back of the fridge for a few years and were starting to smell a bit funky.  That might have been partly because of the week or so without electricity after the earthquake.

After some discussion with the butcher for this homekill - separate from the homekill itself, he's independent - he gave me back two 20 litre buckets of meat for sausages.  For me to make the sausages myself that is.  I'm happy with this by the way, but I didn't really expect quite so much meat.

A hank (approx 90m) of hog casings in salt

I went and picked up some hog casings and a salami kit from Oskar's Butcher.  Kees is a lovely chap who is happy to talk for ages on the virtues of making your own smallgoods although he was a little horrified at how much of the offal I used for dog food rather than for smallgoods.  He emails out links and documents to all his customers that includes instructions for how to make several different cold smokers and a lot about the science of sausage making.

Soaking the casings in water

The first thing I went looking for however was recipes for sausages made purely from beef.  Most recipes contain pork as well.  Lets-Make-Sausage has a fantastic range as well as some valuable advice on sausage making.  I also loved this website - Hunter * Angler * Gardener * Cook for it's recipes, but also because some of the recipes work great for foods like bear meat and where he says venison, he is including elk, moose and other beasties that boggle a kiwi girl like me.

Kees from Oskar's Butcher also sends everyone to Wedliny Domowe -  a Polish site with a wealth of information, advice and recipes for not just sausages but almost every type of cured meat you can imagine.  The about us page is worth a look too.  I have no idea what the name translates to properly, but my limited Russian (which is often very similar to Polish) reminds me that Domovoi (close to how I think domowe from the title is pronounced) is a house spirit - similar to a Brownie from folklore, every house has one and it will only do bad things to those living in the house if they don't keep a good, neat and tidy house.

Sausage casings going on to sausage attachment

Again, I digress.

Firstly, I had to set up my meat mincer.  My benches are too thick for the clamp on the mincer, so I have to get a bit creative with this.

I also don't think it's possible to put the casings onto the attachment without a few teenage humour type jokes and innuendos, silly giggles and what not.  Yes, we all know what it looks and feels like and I think it's all right to laugh about it.

I made beef only Breakfast Sausages.  For 2kg of beef to become 30 sausages took me about 3 hours.  My little mincer was cheap.  I'm not sure if it's possible to sharpen the blades, but I think that's something we should look at.  All the stringy bits from the meat clog up the blade so it comes to a complete block and stop every second sausage.

I thought I'd try putting the meat through the food processor before I put it through the mincer.  That didn't end so well.  I have somehow broken it in such a way that the whole blade attachment will turn freely around and around on the central drive shaft (which it shouldn't do) but I can't take it off the central drive shaft.  Hubby tried and broke my favourite wooden spoon on it.

Dicing pork for sausages

Minced twice, seasoned, tested and ready for making sausages!

I've fixed that issue now.  I finely dice the meat and fat first.  I run it through the mincer, sometimes twice, without the sausage attachment.  Then I add seasonings and other stuff, test some (fried up as patties) and when I'm happy with the blend, I take the plate off the mincer before adding the sausage attachment.

The Science and Art of Sausages

Sausage making is both an art and a science.  The science is the mix that works best for sausages.  They require a minimum of 30% fresh fat.  It needs to be fresh and not cooked or rendered.  I have tried using rendered fat in my sausages - it melts very quickly and easily running out of your sausage through the holes you have pricked in the skin and leaves you with a very dry and unpleasant sausage.  Fresh fat breaks down more slowly, it keeps the sausage moist and carries the flavour.

Salt.  You may not use a lot of salt in your cooking or in your diet, but in nearly all meat dishes, it's importance cannot be overlooked.  In any cooking show on tv they are always pushing seasoning.  Season your meat, season this, season that.  For the most part, they are talking about salt.  Salt improves and enhances the flavours of your food.

Test patty cooking

It helps if you can keep the meat cold while working with it.  As with any form of butchery or working with meat that isn't cooking it. 

This is all that is really needed for sausages.  I've read a document (I'm not sure if I can share the document itself, it came with my purchases from Oskar's Butcher) in which a story is recounted.  The narrator had spent a lot of time making sausages with just the right blend of sage and thyme in them.  When he was happy with the way the herbs complemented the meat he gave some to his sausage making mentor.  "Sausage is nice," the mentor said, "but what's with all the perfume?"

To the mentor a sausage is meat, fat, salt and pepper in a hog casing.  Anything else is perfume and unnecessary.  But this is where the art comes in.  A plain sausage is fine, sometimes.  Other times I like different tastes, flavours and textures.  Different textures can come from finely mincing half the meat and only coarsely mincing the rest - as with a Kielbasa.

Kielbasa - Polish Garlic Sausage.

I look for recipes on the websites I shared earlier and anywhere I can find them.  But then I play with the blends, I taste test and quality control with patties.  Sometimes I get caught up making more patties because they're just so delicious.  One thing the patties can't do is let you know how the fat you use will go.  You can make a meat patty with a lean mince that isn't particularly dry, but using the same mince and recipe in a sausage will come out differently.