Sausage-fest

A few years ago, I took a meats class at school.  They have a working slaughterhouse on the premises, and I wanted to know if I had the nerve to process my own animals (turns out I did).  In addition to the butchering process, we learned all kinds of great techniques and recipes, including recipes for jerky, bacon, prosciutto, bologna, and sausages.  I liked making this stuff so much that I tried a few times at home, and then got wise and actually bought some equipment.

That's right, ladies and gentlemen - I own a sausage stuffer.  What, don't you?  Come on, everyone needs one of these!  What's more fun than cramming raw meat into hog intestines?  Nothing, that's what.

A Grizzly brand 5 pound vertical sausage stuffer - best bang for the buck

Allow me to paint a picture for you to convince you that you want to do this.  You're out at a German restaurant, and you get the bavarian sausage assortment.  You think to yourself, these are delicious!  I have to pick some of these up and cook them at home!  But then you go to your Safeway, or your Kroger, or your whatever, and there is no knockwurst to be found.  No bockwurst, no linguisa, no boudin blanc, no andouille.  Maybe there's some chorizo or bratwurst, but these are made by Emeril or Johnsonville, and you know they're shells of their original glory.  But then someone at the store tells you, "hey, you can make any kind of sausage you want.  Just get into the back of my van and I will show you."  And hopefully, you do NOT take him up on this offer, and instead stumble onto my blog and read on about how to do this.

Making sausage is actually surprisingly easy, and I think it's pretty fun.  If you buy ground meat, all you really have to do is toss in seasonings and get it into the casings, which can take as little as 20 minutes if you're good.  Of course, this can also be a very frustrating activity if you never had any instruction in this, so maybe you should read this guide before you run out and try to throw a bratwurst party for 30 hungry Germans.

I have tinkered with equipment in a few different combinations, and here is what I have decided you will need, at the absolute minimum, in order to make sausage:

1. Sausage stuffer.  This assumes, of course, that you want to stuff the sausage into casings, and not just make patties with the sausage.  5 pounds holding capacity is a good starting point.  These things cost from $30 up to a few hundred, depending on what you get.  I recommend the one from Grizzly tools - it's the same exact one as on Amazon and other places, but isn't marked up as much.  Whatever you do, do NOT use the sausage stuffer tubes that attach to the food grinder of the KitchenAid.  These don't work at all.
2. A large baking sheet, for collecting the sausages
3. Toothpicks (all will be made clear later)
4. A good, sharp knife, preferably a boning knife (for tearing down large hunks of bone-in pork)
5. A food grinder of some kind, preferably something like the KitchenAid food grinder

There are plenty of good recipe sources online, but what is often frustrating when searching for sausage recipes is that most of them are for recipes USING sausage, not recipes for MAKING sausage.  If you're really serious, I recommend Home Sausage Making, by Susan Peery.  If you're only kind of serious, just read on.

My friends heard that I had this sausage stuffer, and basically demanded that I teach them how to do this.  Perhaps it's a guy thing, I'm not sure.  But there is definitely something satisfying about grinding, linking, and grilling meat without having a butcher do anything for you.  With that, how about we jump into the recipe, and I walk you through the process.

Homemade Italian Sausages

Adapted from Home Sausage Making, by Susan Peery

I have modified this recipe to omit some of the added fat, because I don't think your average Italian sausage really requires the extra, plus if you trim it up right, a pork shoulder has roughly the right proportions.  But if you really want to go the distance, use the original recipe, which calls for 4.5 pounds of lean pork butt, plus 0.5 pounds of pork fat.

• 5 feet medium hog casings
• 5 pounds pork shoulder
• 2 tbsp kosher or coarse salt
• 1 tbsp fennel seed
• 1 tbsp freshly ground black pepper (medium grind)
• 2 tsp crushed red pepper flakes to taste

Let's start at the top here, since this will probably cause the most confusion.  Hog casings?  What the heck does that mean?  Well, essentially it's a euphemism for 'cleaned out hog intestines'.  Yes folks, that's what you've been eating.  My sincerest apologies if you did not know, but it's been working for hundreds of years, and I don't think now is a good time to stop.  Sure, there are artificial cellulose casings for the squeamish, but what's the point?  These things work, and they have great 'grill snap' - that bite you get when subjecting the collagen in the intestinal walls to a dry, high heat.  They're also incredibly elastic and durable, and while slimy and gross to work with, they get the job done.

Where do you get hog casings?  Now THAT is a tough question to answer.  I have found them at local butchers' shops, as well as some grocery stores.  You may want to look by the chicken livers, as well as by the refrigerated pickles.  Look for either a bag, or a 1 pint tub with the casings packed in salt.  They will keep for months preserved in there.

Now, here's how you work with these things.  First, separate out a few feet of the casings from the big ball that will be packed into the tub / bag.  If packed in salt, you will want to rinse them off thoroughly.  I take a big pot, yank out the casings I need, and fill the pot with water, cycling it twice to get all the salt out.  Once I have a strand free, I run water through the casing like a water balloon, to clean it out, check for tears, and make sure there's nothing hiding inside.

Cleaning and separating the hog casings

At this point, you've got a big pot of casings ready to go.  The next step is to prepare the pork.  If it's ground pork, you're already done.  But if you're a purist and want to know exactly what cut of meat you're working with (and I suggest you do, since it's more fresh and you can say with certainty what cut of pork you used), I suggest buying a pork shoulder (picnic or butt) and trimming it up for grinding.  Follow the instructions for the grinder, which probably says to cut it into narrow strips, like this:

Trimmed pork shoulder for grinding

Note the amount of fat I left on there - this makes for much more delicious sausage in the end (hey, I never said this would be healthy).  I won't go through the whole process of grinding, but just try to keep everything as cold as possible to make life easier.  In the end, you will have about 5 pounds of ground pork to work with.

Grinding the pork strips

The finished ground pork

From here, you will add your spices.  At this point, you  could make any of a number of sausage recipes, but my friends demanded Italian sausage, so that's what we went with.  Fennel and hot pepper flakes are the main ingredients in hot Italian sausage, so that's what's going on here.  Stir everything up with your hands, and allow to rest and for flavors to combine.

Adding the spices to the pork.  Cook it from here, and you've got Italian sausage patties

Now comes the fun part - stuffing the sausages.  First, install a medium stuffer tube onto the hopper of the sausage stuffer.  Put on a few drops of vegetable oil so the casings don't stick.  Then slide the casings onto the tube, bunching up so they all fit on there.  Tie a knot at the end when you're done, so you've got a big casing 'sock' on this tube.

Loading the casings onto the stuffer tube

A close-up

Fill up the hopper with the meat mixture.  This is why a 5 pound recipe works well - it's the exact amount this thing was designed for.  Put the hopper in the base, and start cranking down until meat starts coming through the tube and is about to start pushing the sock off the tube.  Now stop.  Contemplate your life.  Why am I doing this?  Am I ready for what is about to happen here?  Is anyone around that can witness this?  Actually, I strongly encourage you to have help for this.  Turning the crank and linking the sausages is definitely a two person job.

The stuffer hopper, with 5 pounds of sausage mix loaded and ready for action

Start turning the crank, SLOWLY.  As meat fills up the casings, they will start to fill up and expand.  For the first casing, you will probably get a large air pocket in the casing first.  This is where the toothpicks come in handy.  Just poke a small hole in the casing and let the air out.  Don't get crazy with the holes, or else the casings will rupture and you'll have a mess on your hands.  But use them to keep the links free of air pockets.

You want to use both hands in this process.  One hand should keep some pressure on the tube to dispense the casings only as fast as needed, and the other should wrangle the links coming off into the right shape, and twist them off as they come through.  Note what my friend is doing here - keeping everything under control:

Feeding the sausage into the casings

If you're going to make links, fill up about 4-6" of casing, then twist 2-3 times around.  Repeat with the next link, but twist the OPPOSITE direction.  Otherwise, the links will just unravel themselves, and you'll have a mess at the end.  If you're just doing sausage rope, you don't have to twist anything.  Either way, keep going until you're out of meat in the hopper, and then tie off the last link and head out to the grill.  If you burst a lot of links and have a bunch of meat you want to still try to get cased, open up the hopper, reload, and continue until you are satisfied.

Twisting the links

A little later on...

And, we're done!  Only one blown out casing - not too bad.

That's it!  You have now made your own sausage.  They probably don't look perfect, but mine don't look perfect either.  At least you can say that you made them yourself.  Plus, you can start experimenting with all kinds of different ingredients.  Chicken and apple sausage?  Alligator sausage?  Thanksgiving sausage?  Bacon and bourbon sausage?  Basically, you can make anything into a sausage - you just have to dream it.

Sausage on the grill.  I don't need to give directions here.

The finished product.  Italian sausages, made entirely by you

If you have any amazing successes, I'd like to know about what kind of crazy ingredients you combined.  Maybe I'll post the best recipes, and we can get some kind of underground sausage cult following started.  Or maybe not - just go make sausage!