Making Sausage

The Set Up

Cindy, true to her German heritage, has always wanted to learn how to make sausage, so she took a class from Mary Ann Vitale at Great News a couple of weeks ago.

Ever since then, she's been champing at the bit to make her own, so yesterday she went to Mona Lisa Deli in Little Italy and bought some pork and some sausage casings.

Today she prepared the ingredients and the casings, set it all up on the kitchen table and impressed her Assistant Kitchen Scullion (namely me) into service, and off we went.

Cindy held the casing while I pressed the prepared meat and herbs into the mixer's hopper.  The auger in the mixer pushes the meat mixture out into the casings and Cindy made sure it was filling evenly and without too many air pockets.

Making The Links

Soon we had four different sets of casings filled, and it looked pretty good for our first attempt.

Cindy then separated the stuff into separate sections and twisted them into links.  So now we have four different sausage mixes with tarragon, basil, fennel, lemon balm, parsley and sage, all of which came from our garden, with some of our tomatoes, some asiago cheese and I wouldn't be at all surprised if there was some of our zucchini in there, too.

Sausage

That's one of the advantages of making your own sausage:  you can use your own ingredients, put whatever mix you want together, and you definitely know what's in it.