Homemade sausages

[FrenchTart]

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

 

[FrenchTart]

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).

 

[FrenchTart]

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.

 

[FrenchTart]

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

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

 

[FrenchTart]

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