Sausages, sausages and more sausages

One of the major jobs that follows on from collecting the pork from the butcher is making our own sausages by hand. It’s no small job to turn a boned out shoulder and a boned out half belly into enough sausages to last us three months. This time around, we made Vaguely Cajun sausages, garlic sausages (pictured), Stonehead’s breakfast sausages and Southern sausage forcemeat.

The pork is par-frozen, then sliced into slabs and then into fingers that can be fed into the mincer. The pork is a lot darker and more firm than most people are used to - having only seen pale, limp intensively reared pork - and has excellent marbling. The fat may look excessive, but most will drain off during cooking and it seriously enhances the flavour.

It takes about two hours to cut up and then hand mince 18lb of meat, then about an hour to mix and stuff each individual batch. It’s hard, chilly work as all the heating has to be off, the meat is par-frozen and once each batch is started, the processing can’t stop for any reason. I mix and stuff a batch at a time, keeping the remaining meat in the refrigerator until needed. All the utensils and pans are washed between batches, as is the plastic tablecloth, and everything is scalded with boiling water before being used to do the next batch.

 

Hand stuffing using a cast-iron miner with stuffing nozzles takes quite a long time, but the meat doesn’t get overheated and the slowness of the process gives you more control. Of course, it’s a lot easier when you a champion sausage stuffer to help you! I’ll post recipes in the next day or two, but it’s late and I’m too tired to write more, other than to point people to a more detailed description of how we make sausages.