Making Sausage

We spent this weekend working for ourselves, starting on Friday by putting down 15 gallons of our home-made wine “House Red.” Right now, all three five-gallon buckets are bubbling away converting sugar to wine; wine which will be ready to drink in about a year (earlier if we want something a little ‘spirited’ to drink). Age is the ticket with wine.

The remainder of our weekend, Jay was cutting up free wood, to heat our house, greenhouse and wood fired hot tub, while I was making about 40 pounds of sausage. It was a fine and productive weekend.

All three projects made for wonderfully cheap and useful items; wood to heat, wine to drink and sausage to enjoy for the entire year. This entry I’ll speak of sausage; the ease in making it and the money saved by making it ourselves; not to mention the fact that we know exactly what is in it… no creepy additives, preservatives and coloring to make it look good in the grocery store cooler!

Later, I’ll talk about how we make our wine and where we get our free wood, along with information about our wood fired hot tub. Now on to some sausage talk!

At our local Cash & Carry, I picked up three nice packages of pork butt, for 99 cents a pound, along with pork belly or fat back, as some folks call it; both the main ingredients in most sausage recipes. I ended up with 30 pounds of pork and 3 pounds of fat back per 10 pounds of sausage; ratio needed to make good sausage, as pork alone is too lean. By the time I was finished, our sausage cost us about $1.20 per pound, as opposed to nearly $3.00 a pound at the store (Navy Commissary). I’d say, that is a fair savings!

Out of the pork and fat back and about 6 pounds of beef, we made Bratwurst, Italian Sausage and two different kinds of breakfast sausage. I put about 10 pounds by of the breakfast sausage loose, to use as patties; the rest was stuffed into casings, as were the brats and Italian sausage. Why more people don’t make their own sausage, is beyond me, as it saves quite a bit of money and frankly, is fun to make.

To start, as I mentioned above, you need about 3 pounds of fat back to every 10 pounds of pork butt for a good sausage base. Any less fat mixed in with the pork butt makes for dry and crumbly sausage. The brats call for veal, but it’s hard come-by and is really too expensive, so I use a cheap cut of beef.

Making the sausage is very easy: grind meat, add spices, and stuff into a casing… that’s it. No secrets and no hocus pocus. If you don’t have a grinder, buy ground pork from your butcher; it costs more, but not that much more. I grind our sausage with a cast iron hand grinder (you can usually find one of these at your local St. Vincent de Paul, Salvation Army or local junk store, for a couple of bucks. If you have a Kitchen-Aid mixer, you can buy a grinder/stuffer attachment.

Some sausage can be left loose, such as the Italian and breakfast sausage and cooked as patties or made into meatballs. The brats, on the other hand, need to be stuffed in casings. For this you need a sausage stuffer. You can use the attachment for the Kitchen-Aid mixer, but it tends to turn the sausage into a pasty pâté-like substance. It’s better to use a stuffer that uses pressure instead of an auger to push the sausage into the casing. I use an Enterprise cast iron sausage stuffer. If you can find one, it’s a jewel. It doesn’t do much of anything except stuff sausage, but it does it beautifully. If you’re lucky and find one with a basket in it, it also works as a fruit press. Look on e-bay or in a junk store. If you find one for $100, consider yourself lucky, as they go for around $550 new. If you’re truly lucky you inherited one.

To stuff the sausage into casings, you obviously need casings; we use natural hog and sheep casings, which we buy on-line from Butcher & Packer Supply Company, because we can’t find them locally.

Once you have these items, you are ready to roll. Again, even if you don’t have a sausage stuffer, try one of these recipes and don’t bother stuffing the sausage into casings…you’ll be glad you did.

Recipes:

Breakfast Sausage
10 pounds pork butt
3 pounds fat back (or substitute bacon)
2 tablespoons curing/canning salt
4 tablespoons rubbed sage
2 tablespoons coarse ground black pepper
3 teaspoons ground cloves
1 teaspoon thyme leaves
1 teaspoon ground allspice
3 medium onions chopped fine or ground
4 full heads of minced garlic

Gourmet Country Sausage
(This one is based on a recipe I dug out of an old issue of Mother Earth Magazine)
10 pounds pork butt
3 pounds fat back (or substitute bacon)
4 teaspoons brown sugar
3 tablespoons curing/canning salt
8 tablespoons rubbed sage
2 tablespoons coarsely ground black pepper
2 teaspoons paprika
2 teaspoons nutmeg
3 whole heads of fresh garlic, minced

Italian Sausage
10 pounds pork butt
3 pounds fat back (or substitute bacon)
2 tablespoons curing/canning salt
2 ½ tablespoons coarse ground black pepper
2 ½ tablespoons ground coriander
4 full heads fresh garlic, minced
2 tablespoons crushed red pepper flakes
½ cup paprika
1 cup dry white wine (don’t use cooking wine-if you won’t drink it out of a glass, don’t cook with it)

Bratwurst
6 pounds pork butt
4 pounds veal or beef
3 pounds fat back (or substitute bacon)
4 ½ cups red wine (don’t use cooking wine-if you won’t drink it out of a glass, don’t cook with it)
3 tablespoons curing/canning salt
1 ½ tablespoons onion salt
1 ½ tablespoons ground white pepper
1 ½ tablespoons marjoram
1 ½ tablespoons parsley flakes
¾ teaspoon nutmeg
¾ teaspoon celery seed
2 teaspoons ginger
2 teaspoons mace
2 teaspoons cardamom (or substitute same amount of cinnamon and ginger)

These are just a few recipes to start with, and are ones we use. Look around your local library or check out recipes on the web for an outstanding variety of sausage recipes.

Enjoy making your sausage. Now, I’m off to cut apart all those links of sausage, and get them packaged and in the freezer!