Sausage Update

We had some of the sausage Cindy made yesterday this morning as breakfast sausage, and it was delicious.

I was amazed that the whole sausage making process went so smoothly, especially after the earlier Mozzarella fiasco; since it had taken us almost an entire day to make a 30-minute Mozzarella recipe, I was anticipating at least half a day to make a 20-minute sausage recipe.

It probably actually took Cindy most of a half day to cut up the pork and prepare the various mixtures or herbs and spices and to soak the casings, but the process of getting the meat into the casings was fairly quick.  Having the Kitchen Aid sausage maker attachment helped a lot; it would have been a lot messier process if we had had to stuff the casings by hand.

Years ago somebody described a participant in a litigation case I was working on as a "sausage maker".  When I asked what that meant, I was told, "He turns out a good product, but you don't want to look in the kitchen and see how he did it."  Oh.  Got the picture.

But ours turned out to be a good product, our kitchen didn't get messy and we used our own herbs and tomatoes in the process.  

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.