Man, this is gonna be a large gallery. I made a new batch of sausages today, following my basic recipe – we hope to have the one or the other grill party here with some friends. Not everything went straight, but in the end, it worked out fine.
I already bought the meat (pork shoulder and belly, 3.0 kg in total) about two weeks ago but then work came up and I had to delay the whole thing and freeze the meat.
So, first of all, it’s all about cutting up the meat and then grinding it. I prefer a rougher grind (the 5mm-disc), because I like the “coarse” variant of sausages. Then it’s mixing your spices and kneading them in, followed by some rounds in the food-processor with a kneading hook for the binding. Then cool everything.
This is where the trouble started. I dedicatedly bought some sheep casings for the new sausages (they’re smaller and thinner than pork casings), only to find out that they wouldn’t fit on my grinder tube. After an unsuccessful attempt on building something like an “adapter” I had to thaw some pork casings that I still had in the freezer. Those, of course, didn’t come in a salt brine, but just salted, so I first had to experiment on how long to rehydrate and soak them. It’s about 30 minutes in lukewarm water, I have proof now.
From then on it went the usual way with grinding again, filling the casings and vaccuum sealing them for the freezer. I left 5 of them for me to eat tonight anyway, they make my mouth water.