Homemade Sausage Making

Well, you can test the paprika how "real" it is.

In a glass of clean cold water. Put some in there. If it sinks down fest, it might be paint, or brick dust, or maybe moon dust......

That's interesting. I'm going to try that with some Walmart spice.

Hmmm........

This......"If it sinks down fest" should be..........If it sinks down fast......FAST.

Many traditional sausage put-ups are a pound or more and that was good when families were large and a sausage was divided into six or eight pieces and there were lots of cabbage, potatoes, carrots, beets and turnips. But today families are small and for my family we can get three meals from a 2 pound chicken half. This makes a one pound sausage into at least two meals and some times even three. My answer to this has been to use smaller casings and shorter links. This brings me to the current exercise: project "B".
It is absurd to feed a beagle dog the same as you would feed a great dane and by the some token should we not adjust a the size of our sausage make ups to meet our meal size needs and abandon the traditional put ups?

I make 15# to 50# batches of sausage and freeze them for later use. Its too much trouble to clean all the equiptment for 2# of sausage. IMHO

Costco sells boneless pork butt two to a package. I like to get a 15 lb package and make 3 difft types in one go, for the same reason that I don't want to clean all the equipment for a small batch.

We live in a small house and though I'm a night owl, the wife does not like me rattling around till the wee hours grinding, mixing, stuffing, cleaning while she tries to sleep through the noise. So now I split the work up. Less tiring for myself this way, too. And I can get some help from the kids this way, since they are still awake while I'm working. The real bonus is that this gets them involved in learning the craft!

1st night - grind
2nd night - cure, seasonings
3rd night - regrind if recipe calls for it, mix, stuff
4th night - smoke (if called for)
5th night - freeze, or hang (as appropriate)

Last night I got going on coppa, cotto, and mortadella. Very excited about the cotto, as I've never tried it before. Also the coppa, which I tried once, using the Rhulman recipe, and didn't get a good result. This time I went with Marianski.

Big Guy wrote:I make 15# to 50# batches of sausage and freeze them for later use. Its too much trouble to clean all the equipment for 2# of sausage. IMHO

For those of you who don't mind small batches, however (It's just the wife and me, and she doesn't eat much meat), try the "Russ-N-Ross Ramrod" stuffer at http://wedlinydomowe.pl/en/viewtopic.ph ... c&start=15 This li'l baby works fine on about a pound of sausage mix. Look for my "Widget for Meat Distribution" (a.k.a Russ-N-Ross RamRod) on page 2 of the thread. It's made of PVC pipe and fittings, plus a large caulk gun, and cost me less that $25. ...works well in conjunction with with my #8 grinder.

Note that I bought a "nibble tool" from Radio Snack to enlarge the hole in the end plate where the stuffer tube pokes out, so I can thread casing onto the tube [stuck through the end piece] before inserting it into the whole shebang. Works great! More filling! And you can put all the PVC parts into the dishwasher when you are through.

I wouldn't go below about a 1-pound batch, though, because of (lack of) scale accuracy. I can measure spices down to a tenth of a gram with my $18.50 "drug dealer" scale from the local pawn shop. For some of the spices, that's pushin' it.

It's also my wife and me at our house. When we get hungry for "good-sausage", I mess up my small grinder only, and that's anytime.....I mix it, yes the hungarian one, for the taste/spiciness of the moment, and make big hamburger size patties, and bake them in the oven. They are o.k. warm too, but cold out of the refrigerator is I think, "this is what they mean being in haven".

Sausage the best when it's eaten with another sausage, because bread has waaaaay too much flour in it......

I was referring to the size of the links more than the size of the batch. Putting sausage up in one pound links as is traditional for some types might be better for small families in half pound links or smaller. I grind several pounds at a time and package it in convenient meal size portions for freezing.

Nancy enjoys a "girls night out" with several friends in a room at the parish house at our church. Bear in mind that we are Epicopalians so this isn't a koolaid and ritz crackers night. I made small meatballs from a package of loose charice sausage. They are only just a little bigger than marbles and will be dandy for a group that stays aware of how much they eat.

I made a batch of Hot smoked Polish sausage, http://www.wedlinydomowe.com/sausage-re ... hot-smoked today and used 3 pounds of pork and a pound and a half of totally lean venison. Today is too warm and too windy for me to consider smoking and cooking this so I am treating it as fresh sausage. This is the third time I have made it this way and am eager to make a batch to smoke. A friend had requested that I make some more.

Yesterday on the Polish site of WD there was a sausage presented where they used hot water 80C (176F) in mixing and then stuffing the meat. I made the comment that this was a departure from standard practice and the reply was that this is what you do when you want your sausage to have a crumbly texture. Am I the only one that did not know this?

http://wedlinydomowe.pl/forum/viewtopic ... 620#286620

I think we know that making sausage with warm meat makes it crumbly, and that's the reason we don't make it purposely.
Take for example the head cheese. We have to have some kind of gelatine to glue/hold it together.
But it doesn't mean there aren't people who prefer it. Different people have different taste.
I think there is a dish they want the sausage to be crumbly, it's called dirty rice.

Red, Not much help. I can't read Polish. The google translation leaves much to be desired.

Ross, it was not my intention for you to read the thread but just to take a peek at the picture. All I was asking was about using hot water in the sausage making process. I guess I have to make a better effort in framing my questions.