Sausage Making

Some people want to travel all the continents or climb Mt. Everest before they die. Me, I've always wanted to make my own sausage. I love the stuff. Coming from generations of Polish Detroiters, I believe my love for sausage is just in my blood. Even when I was a vegetarian for 7 years (through two pregnancies even), I craved sausage(I ate soy sausage during those years but it just doesn't compare). Breakfast links, kielbasa, knackwurst, any kind of brats, loose sausage... it's all good. Being fairly health conscious, one feels a little guilty for eating the stuff too often. Sausage is full of saturated fat and if store bought, full of freakish, unpronounceable chemicals and fillers.

We've been borrowing Alton Brown's Good Eats dvds from the library lately. He's one of my favorites from Food Network. We watched an entire episode about sausage making. That was it!
Friday I finally broke down and bought the food grinder attachment for the mixer. Saturday I found the sausage stuffing tips attachment. We bought an enormous pork shoulder. We needed fatback, but the butcher at the store didn't have any, so we bought the fattiest bacon we could find to use in its place. Since we didn't have any casings on hand, we made breakfast sausage patties. If you look at the picture above, you can see that my husband made the first three the size of hamburgers. I finished making the rest into more normal breakfast patty size.
In the ingredients we included sage, thyme, rosemary, salt and pepper, and red pepper. We finished up with 2 1/2 pounds of meat. I froze 8 patties and the rest we cooked last night. Very tasty with a good mouth feel. If you know me at all, you know that I get freaked out by funny mouth textures (part of which is why I didn't eat meat for so long). Strange, unexpected lumps and bumps and grissely bits will stop me dead in my tracks. Ack. Grinding your own meat, with your own ingredients, lends a very safe feeling to eating if you're like me and get obsessive about mouth feel.
The good news is that kids loved it too. I felt like the sage was a bit strong, but obviously, there's so much room for tweaking seasonings. There will be no stopping us now! We've got lamb, chicken, pork and turkey in the freezer. Once summer comes and we have fresh herbs again-- yikes! Just think of the tasty savory herbed sausage we can make!Yum!
I ordered collagen casings last night on sausagemaker.com.
Strange stuff, but much nicer to work with them real casings that are really difficult and spoil within a day or two. When those arrive, we can embark on making savory dinner sausages and breakfast links.
I'm sure more pictures will follow when we commence stuffing!

In other news, I received my seed order from Fedco yesterday and am so excited just to file through them, reading their lovely names and imagining how they will grow! It's the little things in life, right? Collagen casings and seed packets...ah, what a nice weekend.