Sausage Making

Glaucus · 7 Jun 2013 at 16:16

Totally depends how much the meat is, I use high qaulity meat so not really compared to supermarket.

Casings cost next to nothing, hen depends what ingriedents you use.

FrenchTart · 7 Jun 2013 at 16:37

How did the dried onions experiment turn out in the end? Quite an interesting idea that I might steal if it works

Glaucus · 7 Jun 2013 at 16:52

I'll tell you later, bbq tonight.

FrenchTart · 7 Jun 2013 at 16:58

Glaucus said:
I'll tell you later, bbq tonight.

Good choice

PlacidCasual · 7 Jun 2013 at 18:20

How do you get on with the Andrew James mincer? I was happy with the mincing but could hack it for stuffing. I moved to a barrel piston type stuffer which I found much easier to use.

ps your sausages look good how did they taste.

Glaucus · 8 Jun 2013 at 11:24

Yet again tasted good but texture is still far to grainy and doesn't bind.
I'm ee ping the meat ice cold when grinding/stuffing so I don't think it's that.

The one thing I did see on dinners, drive ins and dives is that after grinding they stuck it in to a food mixer with a paddle and used that for about 10minutes.

Has anyone ever got sausages with a good texture what's the secret?

FrenchTart · 9 Jun 2013 at 00:57

They look very nice. Damn shame they didn't turn out how you wanted them to though :/

I've found the texture of homemade sausages somewhat hit and miss. The best ones I made were using lamb shoulder (technique for freezing/etc was exactly the same as you use). I used very little in the way of breadcrumbs in that one. I think I most likely used zero breadcrumbs and lots of green/regular onion. I definitely made sure everything onion/garlic-related was extremely finely chopped and due to my lack of knowledge at the time I'm pretty sure I didn't put much in the way of breadcrumbs in the mix. If I did it was actual minced fresh bread rather than dry breadcrumbs.

I think the above is worth experimenting with though definitely not worth taking as gospel in terms of obtaining decent results.

randomshenans · 9 Jun 2013 at 11:00

I think you also trimmed too much fat off. I didn't use enough my first couple of gos and they really need some good fat in there to make them juicy.

Glaucus · 9 Jun 2013 at 15:03

I very much doubt it's lack of fat, there's still huge amounts of fat left.
Also same texture on the other sausages which had added pork back fat in them.

I really do think its something to do with the grinding.
I also know salt massively affects binding, but it had a fair bit of that in it.
I'll have to give the mixer method a try.

FrenchTart · 9 Jun 2013 at 22:16

I'm not sure that mixing it more would make the texture better.

I think part of the issue is that commercial sausages have 'conditioned' us to expect things to be homogeneous and when we make things at home it has more of a texture. What we think of as grittiness isn't actually a bad thing. Perhaps the dried onion thing isn't suitable I guess.

I think randomshenans' point about fat is actually a good one. I know you're (Glaucus) not one to scrimp on fat in a recipe but I do think that more is..well, more... in the sausage situation. The best sausages I ever made were made from a mixture of lamb leg and pork shoulder (mostly the fat on the shoulder). They are the only ones I ever made that didn't suffer from the slightly gritty texture you have described.