Sausages….

As I wend my way through various recipes and types of food, from chilli apple jelly, to smoked salmon and on to a Gala Pie I found myself wanting to have a go at making some sausages. For Christmas my ‘outlaws’ kindly gave me a sausage making machine, so there were fewer reasons not to have a go! It all sounds very good, but what do I need, where can I find them?! The basics, i.e. meat and spices are easy to find, but what about a recipe or some hog casings? If in doubt turn to DIY Food by Tim Haywood and Amazon; DIY Food for a list of hog casing suppliers and Amazon for a book on making sausages. I duly ordered 2 x 20m of hog casings (that’s a lot of sausages) and a book by Paul Peacock.

I’m not going to go through each and every step that I (we, you need a partner to make sausages) took; just the recipe, what we learned and what we would do differently. First up the recipe. Living in Lincolnshire it had to be a Lincolnshire sausage so loads of Sage from the garden and some pork shoulder from John at The Cholmley Arms.

• 1kg pork shoulder
• 250g rusk
• 250ml water
• 10g salt
• 5g black pepper
• 15g Sage

A recipe that I was working from said to use 150 rusk : 150 water unless using hog casings so up by 100 each.

Making the sausages:

A length of hog casing was separated from the hank and soaked in multiple bowls of water for three hours or so. The dry ingredients and the water were

mixed together and left whilst the pork shoulder was ground using the largest grinding plate. All of the ingredients were then mixed together by hand

And then the fun began….

I’ve been racking my brains for a polite way to describe what happens next, but many many people who are far more articulate than me have tried and not succeeded. After feeding some 2m of soaked hog casing over the sausage horn we started. Nothing at first however hard we pushed the mixed ingredients into the machine. In the end we removed all of the innards of the sausage making end of the machine (archimedes screw etc.) and just pushed and pushed. Quite quickly we had filled over a metre of casings with sausage meat, trying not to allow too many air pockets to form.Those that did were pricked. Once we had exhausted the meat supply I tried to link them with some, but not with any great success.

This morning was time to find out…   What better than on a Saturday morning than having a Lincolnshire sausage sandwich for breakfast!!They were very tasty (but I would say that wouldn’t I).

Some things that I will change for next time:

• Not enough Sage – next time will go up say 3g see what they taste like
• Too much rusk – reduce to at least 200g next time
• Soak the casings for longer – minimum overnight or for a full week according to our local butcher.