Making Sausage

For some time now I've wanted to get into sausage making, and finally made the leap today! Actually, I tried it once about 10 years ago but only the once. And now I recall why - that Kitchen Aid sausage stuffer attachment is just terrible! Really difficult to work with, and incredibly slow. The basic problem is that the vertical tube leading into the feeding chamber is tapered when in fact it would be most effective if it were the same diameter the whole way down. The plunger should be perfectly engineered to fit snugly down in there, but it is not. You start plunging down on the mixture and more of it oozes back up the sides than makes it down into the feeding auger. If you take a look at purpose-built stuffers they are exactly as I describe how the Kitchen Aid should be.

Nonetheless, it did get the job done, and the results were really good. But I cannot for the life of me imagine using this thing very often because it would just get way too frustrating. I'm going to buy a proper stuffer for sure.

I just sort of made this recipe up and it worked out extremely well. The spicing was pretty subtle so could easily be jacked up a bit. Well, except for the salt - too much. Next time I'm probably just going to use regular pickling salt without the nitrites - those are only required if you plan to cure or store the sausage. I forgot both the garlic and the pepper - note to self for next time. Here is what I put in there.

• 500g ground pork
• 450g ground beef
• 3 tablespoons smokey pork fat
• 1 tablespoon oat flour
• 1 tablespoon barley flour
• 1 and 1/4 tsp readycure (should have just used salt)
• 1 tablespoon thyme
• 1 tablespoon savory

The smokey pork fat is stuff that I canned up back in the summer of 2008. It was from different cuts of pork that I'd had on the smoker - I drained and/or rendered the fat, and canned it up. The fat still has a nice smokey flavour so adding a bit of it brought that character through to the sausage. Given that the beef was extremely lean, and the ground pork fairly lean, some sort of extra fat was required anyway.