Man of Honour
Pictures all courtesy of JizzyJames
For my birthday in October one of my presents was a meat mincing/sausage stuffing machine. I always enjoyed the idea of stuffing sausage so I quickly put the machine to good use
When cooking I don't tend to keep exact measures of ingredients if I can possibly avoid it but I've attempted to approximate the quantities below. Given the amount of meat, these spice quantities may be a bit on the low side (or high side if I've over-estimated!).
When choosing the meat you will use you want some that has a high fat content. This may seem counterintuitive to those of us that are health conscious but it is very important that your sausages have enough fat in them to remain moist and flavoursome after cooking. Another addition is the breadcrumbs (or rusk if you can be bothered sourcing it). This basically soaks up the fat and juices as they melt, holding the flavours in the sausage rather than letting them all run out when you cook them.
I have used lamb and pork in my sausages below but I have also made sausages using chicken thigh in the past (a sort of chicken chorizo sausage) and they were delicious. The only problem with using things like chicken and beef is that the meat may be too lean. Personally I found chicken thigh to be 'thighn' but I imagine chicken breast and most cuts of beef would be very dry.
Oh yeah.... I have used synthetic casings purely out of laziness and lack of desire to bother with the soaking/etc that real casings would require (sheep intestine for the merguez and hog intestine for the sweet chilli). Real casings should give you a better flavour and actually be easier to work with in the final sausage-stuffing part of the recipe. I thoroughly recommend that you go for the real thing rather than my lazy collagen casing
You will need...
For the merguez sausages:
A fatty cut of lamb (I used lamb belly as it's cheap and tasty)
4 garlic cloves
2 teaspoons of ground fennel seeds
2 tablespoons of harissa
2 teaspoons of cayene pepper
1 teaspoon of black pepper
1 teaspoon of salt
breadcrumbs
thin sausage casings
For the sweet chilli sausages:
A fatty cut of pork (I used 'pork butt'/shoulder)
4 garlic cloves
1/2 - 3/4 bottle of sweet chilli sauce (super lazy way to get sugar, chilli and garlic into it)
2 teaspoons of cayene pepper
2 teaspoons of sweet paprika
1/2 teaspoon of smoked paprika
1 teaspoon of black pepper
1 teaspoon of salt
breadcrumbs
medium sausage casings
First thing to do is to cut up the meat into 2 inch cubes. Once this is done, immediately stick the meat in the freezer. During sausage making you need to keep the meat as cold as possible (pretty much near frozen) at all times. This stops the fats and connective tissues becoming soft/breaking down, which ensures that the sausages have a bit of 'bite' to them and don't turn into the same kind of consistency you see in the 20p basics sausages.
Whilst the meat is in the freezer, start to prepare the spice mixes. Mix all the spices, salt and breadcrumbs together in a bowl, adding the crushed/minced garlic and basically everything apart from the meat and the sausage casing.
Take the meat out of the freezer. Hopefully it is cold enough that holding it for any length of time begins to hurt your hands.
Now for the first run through the mincer. Make sure the mincer is thoroughly clean before use (should be obvious!) and attach the mincer at its most course setting. Much like keeping the meat cold, courser mince means more texture to the sausage. If you were making hotdogs you might use a finer mince but for pretty much everything else, course is the way to go. Stick a plate under the mincer and then start chucking the near-frozon chunks of meat into the top (no idea what this bit of the machine is called...). Use the disturbingly phallic plunger to poke the meat through if it gets stuck.
Once this is minced, mix the spices into it thoroughly before chucking it back into the freezer. Remember, we need this meat to be coooollllddddd.
Right, now for the good bit (read: hardest and most annoying part). Stuffing the sausages.
First off, grab the casings you will be using. I personally tend to oil my hands and the casings for this step as it makes everything a bit easier (lubing up always does when it comes to sausages...). You will then need to feed this casing over the nozzle for the sausage stuffing, as per the pic below. Once the casing is on the nozzle, tie the end of it up with a double knot.
(This next steps are much easier with two people but you can do them alone if you take things a little slower)
Grab the meat out of the freezer, cursing how cold it is on your poor hands.
Turn on your stuffing machine and with your left hand get a firm grasp of the casing at the end of the nozzle and with your right hand, begin feeding your meat into the top of the sausage machine. It will take a few moments before the first bit of meat starts to come through into the casing, but once it does you should be able to quite easily keep it going by feeding meat into the machine as needed.
For the next step you will want to only fill each casing to about 80-90% full. If you completely jam-pack meat in the casing it is much more likely to burst during the cooking process and exploding sausages can be lethal (maybe).
Let the meat fill the casing and as it does so it will slowly push the casing off the nozzle further so that the sausage is formed. Every 6 inches or so (it's really up to you, depending on how big you like your sausage...) stop feeding meat to the machine and lightly pull a bit of the casing off. This will create a gap in the sausage that you can later tie off to create your links.
Once you reach the end of a batch of casing or meat, leave a good few inches at the end of the casing to allow you to tie it off and then start this process again for the rest of the meat/casings.
Once you're done you should have a disturbingly large pile of tied up sausage links. At this point you should take a sharp, clean object (cocktail stick or a needle) and poke a tiny hole wherever you see air pockets in your sausages. These air pockets will cause your sausages to explode if they are left alone.
Now you need to leave these sausages in the fridge for 24 hours. This allows the casings to firm up and 'hug' the sausage meat and for the flavours to develop. However, after tirelessly stuffing sausages all night I never have the patience to leave them all for the next day...
Cooking the sausages
There are several schools of thought as to what is the best way to cook sausages. Personally my favourite is to fry them on a low heat with a sprinkling of olive oil. The frying helps do two things: 1) It keeps the sausages moist (grilling can often dry them out) and 2) caramelising the outside of the sauage during cooking makes the final product about a million times more delicious.
One final one, here's a picture of a friend's plate where he is about to enjoy sticking my sausage in his mouth:
Hope you enjoyed. Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions for improvement
Addendum: Although lamb breast makes very tasty sausages it's also a complete pain in the buttocks to work with so I would recommend a less tough cut. The difficulty in working with it meant that the lamb meat got a lot hotter then I wanted it to and hence you can see the paleness of the uncooked sausages where the fat has softened/broken down.
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