Lessons From My Butcher: Making Sausage

OK, first of all, I wanted to tell you how much I have enjoyed chatting with you about food ethics and meat-eating.  Thank you!  And if you haven't weighed in yet on my first butchery post, I'd like to invite you to do so.  I have some good news-- I talked with David and Caroline today, and they would like to continue teaching me (and us!) more butchery, and even some curing techniques.  I am really excited about this!

Now, I'd like to continue where I left off yesterday, and share with you my first experience making sausages.  As we were breaking down the pig, there were a lot of smaller pieces set aside for this purpose.  They were broken into two categories: fat and lean.

The main thing when choosing the meat for the sausages was to select equal parts lean and fat, to achieve the right textural balance.  I cut up little bits of each, and threw them in the bowl on the scale in equal proportion, until  I had close to a kilo of meat.

 David introduced me to the meat grinder, and seemed amused when I was all, "Cool-- I've always wanted to use one of these!"

I fed the meat through the top, and, sure enough, it came out as ground pork!

To the ground pork, we added about 10% of a gluten-free rusk, which was a blend of rice flour, super-fine salt, and spices.

A bit of water was added as well, to make it easier to blend the rusk into the meat.  I will just note here that the adding of rusk is something I haven't really seen before.  It seems like a distinctly British way of making sausage. I prefer just meat and spices, but it does make the texture much lighter and more cohesive.  David and Caroline worked for years to perfect their base rusk recipe.  It's good!

Today we were making marmalade sausages!  David just added a couple heaping spoonfuls of store-bought marmalade, and I mixed that in well with my hands.

This machine is the sausage stuffer.  We loaded the meat in there, and put something that looked kind of like a plunger in the end, to get it all pressed in without any air bubbles.  There is a crank that steadily presses the sausage meat through the tip.

Sausage casings were soaking in water, and I slid them onto the nozzle.

OK.  Let me just stop right here and tell you that there is a certain awkwardness to making sausages (or even talking about sausages) in mixed company.  David and Caroline joke around a lot, and I inevitably come to a point where I just start blushing and don't know what to do.  But I persevered.

A knot was tied at the end of the casing, and then the trick was to steadily crank the meat into the casing, trying to keep it as even as possible, without over or under-filling.

And then there was a kilo of sausage!

The trickiest part was actually the separating of the pieces and flipping them around and through each other to make that complex signature sausage knot.

And here they are! We had them for dinner, and they were really good!

Have you made sausage before?  Also, any special requests for butchery topics?

This post has been shared at Real Food Forager's Fat Tuesday.

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