Sausage Anyone...????!!!!

Making Your Own Sausage

                Okay, you go to the market and see these outrageous sausages, and you say to yourself, I think I can do that.  Well, to do that you have to have either a sausage maker, or you have to own a Kitchen Aid mixer, and a meat grinder attachment as well as an extruder device, both of which can be purchased at your local kitchen equipment store where you got your Kitchen Aid mixer.

                 For me, I go and buy some nice meat, pork, chicken, lamb or beef, and I grind it first to whatever consistency I feel is right for the type of sausages I make.  So it cooks nice and has the right texture, you have to buy meat with a little fat in it, pork shoulder roast, 30 percent fat beef or the dark meat of the chicken.  Then you have to decide what flavors you are going to infuse into the meat, and incorporate or infuse those ingredients into the meat as you grind the meat.  Let’s just say for Thai sausage you would add lemon grass, red curry paste, cilantro, coconut milk and garlic.  So you would add a little bit of all these ingredients as you grind your meat, and for me, pork goes well with this combination of flavors, but chicken is just as good as a flavor profile for this type of sausage. Don’t put too much coconut milk into the meat, so it will have a nice consistency to it when you start to extrude it.

                 Once you get the meat right, and you can make a meat ball or the shape of a crab cake or slider burger and cook it off and taste it and fiddle around until you are satisfied with your mixture of flavor profiles.  Next you put your extruder on and pull out your casing, and I use a thick pork casing that I get at Willowside  Meats on Guernville Road.  You lubricate your extruder with Pam cooking spray and squeeze on the amount of casing you think you’ll need for the amount of sausage meat you made, tie off the end and stuff the meat into the extruder, keeping the sausage size and thickness even as she goes.  Having one person stuff, the other guiding the cased sausage is easiest and quickest. You either tie it off in equal sizes when there is two of you, or you roll it and tie it off later, if you’re doing this alone, tying a knot in the last sausage on the loop.   You then bake it off between 15 and 20 minutes so it is about half to two thirds cooked and then cut it into single sausages, and vacuum seal, label and date it to freeze for a later date, or save some for meals  or tastings and put it into the refrigerator.

                When you have people over for a tasting serve some coleslaw and baked beans as sides, and all give thanks to the friends who shared your time and trouble and celebrate the harvest of ideas that represent the culinary arts they we all so love to indulge our passions in.