HOW TO MAKE SAUSAGES

Today was a good day since we finally had the time to prepare our Christmas sausages.  Some people have asked for the recipe, so the following few paragraphs aim to give a brief summary of what we did.  Hopefully you’ll be inspired to give sausage making a try.    

First of all, we sourced good quality pork from a local farm shop in the following amounts:  3.5 kg of pork shoulder, 1.0 kg of pork belly.  This was then minced using an old-fashioned hand mincer that we bought online a few years ago.  It’s nice to mince your own meat (rather than buy it from a supermarket) since you have complete control of what your sausages contain.  The ratio of pork shoulder to pork belly can be varied to adjust the fat content of the sausages.  The ratio we chose is for a fairly lean sausage, whilst some people prefer to have a higher fat content; e.g. 50:50 pork shoulder : pork belly.  It’s a matter of personal preference, although it should be noted that sausages do need to contain some fat, otherwise there’s no taste.

Next we finely chopped four medium-sized leeks and added this to the minced pork, along with about 100 g of salt, 300 g of white breadcrumbs, approximately 100 finely chopped sage leaves and our own secret mixture of ground coriander , mustard seeds, garlic and black pepper (adjusted according to taste).  The sausage meat mixture was then made into golf ball size pieces that fitted into the mouth of the hand mincer so that they could be easily extruded into the sausage casings.

The sausage casings were purchased last week (see post below) and were soaked in cold water for around 30 minutes to remove the salt that had been applied to preserve them.  Sections of the casings (up to 2 metres in length) were then placed onto the sausage filling adaptor that fits onto the end of the hand mincer.

After that it was simply a matter of turning the handle of the mincer, feeding it with the golf balls of sausage meat, and twisting the extruded casing every few seconds to form the finest homemade sausage.

We had enough meat to make 120 sausages, which will last us about three months.  All we need to do now is leave them in the fridge for 24 hours to dry off a little and allow the flavours to mix.  This means tomorrow will be a good day too – because we’ll test them!

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