Homemade sausages

FrenchTart

FrenchTart

FrenchTart

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Due to some awesome presents for my birthday (including a meat grinder) I'm going to be making some sausages pretty soon. Some of them will be chorizo but I've also got a load of chipotle chillis I want to use up so I'll be making a batch of chipotle sausages too.

Anybody have any tips or particular recipes to share? I've read up on quite a few but as I've not physically done it before I'd love to hear from someone that has.

I'll be posting photos of the process of making the sausages and the finished result too :)
 
Have you got a smoker?

Would love to make my own, but don't have the equipment yet and it all costs so much for stuff that works, as well as taking up space. Need a bigger kitchen and much more freezer space.
 
Sadly I don't have a smoker :/ I will be making the non-cured kind of chorizo to start with. I may experiment with changing the mix slightly to cure some of them at the end though.

I suspect the lack of space will be an issue for me too, though I'm probably not going to have them as permanent fixtures in the kitchen (I'll put the stuff away after cleaning I guess).
 
Making sausages is a very therapeutic thing I find. as far as recipes go I'm very bad on recipes for this kind of thing as I sort of go with the flow and just crack on with it, but to start with you cant go wrong with classic flavours like pork and sage, but a fresh chorizo is great too and dont scrimp on the smoked paprika youll need a lot. I did a rather succesful chicken thigh and tarragon once, which I've never repeated and can't think why as it rocked.

Make sure you fry off a little bit to check seasoning as you may surprise yourself how much seasoning you need. I would suggest a good amount of fatty cuts. Mainly pork belly and perhaps 1/3 pork shoulder if you like it a bit meatier.

my friends 20 quid plastic mincer and stuffer from Lakeland is actually much better than my significantly more expensive metal one much to my annoyance, so you really can get into making them quite cheap. I would suggest natural casings being much better than the collagen ones, they just dont seem to tear as much as collagen ones and the more irregular sizing looks more attractive too.

I have about 15kg of chorizo and salami kindly being cured in my friends garage right now, as the smell of sausages and almost all my creations are not being appreciated by my pregnant wife right now :(
 
Thanks for the tips :)

I've ordered synthetic casings for now as a few of the comparisons I read suggested that synthetic didn't taste substantially worse (in fact, tasted pretty much the same) and were somewhat easier to work with. I may change over to natural later if I don't like the uniform look of the sausages.

I was going to try and get "pork fat back" from the butcher but if you reckon belly would be okay I might go for that instead as it's a cheap cut that is also damn tasty :) Do you grind the mince particularly finely btw? I'm thinking of keeping it quite coarse.
 
definitely keep it course. I did a couple of batches where I tried a finer grind by putting it through the mincer twice before stuffing and it really affected the texture, making it far too dry and almost gritty. You can certainly get some back fat if your butcher will sell it (often they will just give it to you) to add to your meat and if you were just going to use just shoulder I would say that's needed, but belly generally has enough fat. depending on whether your butcher has just made their sausages they dont always have back fat spare!

Also for acidhell I made a cold smoker from a cannabilised old bbq, aircon ducting and an aluminium bin which cost 40 quid to make. It was fugly and did take up quite some space in my backyard but worked very well for cheese and smoked trout. I'm sure sausages would have been fine too, I just didn't make them then
 
Temperature of the meat is one of the keys to good sausage making. You want the meat a 0degC or near as damn it when mincing. Rechill for mixing in the spices and rusk/breadcrumbs. A lot of the better sausage makers also say you want to work the mixture together well, all the time at low temps, to get a good consistency.

I'm miles away from making good sausages yet but the best ones I've made are always when I keep the meat near freezing.

ww.sausagemaking.org is a good place to get advice.


As to dry cured chorizo it is a good deal more involved than regular sausage making, you'll need a starter culture prague powders and a reliable place to hange them to dry. I've done it and the result had a great texture but a poor taste, I think I needed to max up the spices a bit. Best of all i didn't suffer botulism which is a small but genuine risk with air dried meats.
 
heeeed said:
Also for acidhell I made a cold smoker from a cannabilised old bbq, aircon ducting and an aluminium bin which cost 40 quid to make. It was fugly and did take up quite some space in my backyard but worked very well for cheese and smoked trout. I'm sure sausages would have been fine too, I just didn't make them then
Click to expand...

yeah I've thought about building an out doors one, but in a rented house.
I want this bad boy. Not a bad price either

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/250830941...AX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1423.l2649#ht_1870wt_689
 
Yeah, I was reading up on sausagemaking.org a bit earlier. I also read about using the skin of store-bought salami/etc to sort out the fungus culture and the use of yoghurt as an alternative to the commercial bacteria cultures.

Good to know about the backfat potentially being free. I'll try my luck sometime :p

Most of the recipes I've read don't make use of rusk/breadcrumbs (though I remember using rusk back when I was in high school and had a part time job in a family butcher/baker place). Does it really add much to a high quality sausage or is it just to make the meat go further?

That smoker cabinet looks awesome btw. I'd love to have one but I'm a bit worried by how much stuff I'll have when I move house :)
 
Made a ton of chorizo today. Mostly pork with lots of paprika and garlic but also some from chicken thigh for my health-conscious housemate.

I didn't get any pictures but I'll attempt to get some sorted tomorrow :)
 
Reusing this old thread.

Picked up a meat grinder and sausage making machine a week weeks ago heavily discounted. No real clue what I was doing but they turned out great.

First thing to do is source some sausage casings, which are really just the intestines of a pig (sometimes sheep or cows). I simply asked at the meat counter of my local supermarket who offered to sell me about 8 ft at wholesale, but it wasn't so cheap about $4). Will have to source some online. he intestines are stored in brine, so the first thing to do is to rinse them out. then I left them to soak for 1 hour in room temp water. Then I heated gently for 5 minutes but no where near boiling point.
Then the fun part, I pushed one end over the colder water tap and washed out the insides- much like putting a condom over a tap and filling....
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I couldn't find the pork cuts I wanted so purchased a couple of pounds of pre-ground minced pork. I made 2 different flavors, one was basic herby version but with a bit of all spice, pepper and a small amount of finely chopped garlic. The second was a spicy version with paprika, smoked paprika, chili powder and chili sauce, much more garlic/pepper/all-spice and some BBQ sauce.

You push the intestines on to the nozzle, much like putting on a too small condom... switch the machine on and using a plunger gently push some of the meat mixture down the whole, it gets pushed into the intestines. You can control the amount of stuffing by varying the pressure on the plunger and controlling the amount of intestines pulled from the nozzel. Although the intestines are much like a condom... they will tear at a lower threshold so best not to over stuff.

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The finished article. The stringy bits are attachments to lymph nodes I think, I cut off some of them but during cooking they will just burn off anyway.
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When BBQed they tasted amazing. Wasn't expecting something so good for a first attempt and without a clue what to do, as I always do I didn't follow a recipe but when on instinct. Next time will try something more interesting.

really want to buy a smoker to get some smoked spicy sausages.
 
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