Sausage Making
|
We make a huge variety of sausages, meats, burgers and Patties and vary the recipe from year to year to suit our tastes. Our pigs are too small to really make sausages so we buy a pig twice a year at between 40 and 60kgs dead weight and then spend 5 days on the butchery and sausage making. Normally we buy the pig in December and February mainly because we will have a room cool enough to store meat for a few days, otherwise we would need a very large fridge. We love breakfast bangers and patties, Ventricina, Italian sausage and Cumberlands. We will show you how we do it, the equipment you will need and some of our favourite sausage recipes.
|
|
First, the basics of sausage making
You will of course need the meat, a cool place to store it while you work, good knives, a large working area, a meat grinder with sausage filling nozzles, food grade plastic containers, sausage casings, string, somewhere to hang them and ingredients.
|
We take half a pig and cut it into three primals, more details of which you can find in Butchery but basically it's the shoulder, leg and finally the mid section which Jarvo takes to make our bacon. Certain sausages are better with a certain type of meat. For example, Ventricina is made from leg meat, fat and offcuts from the belly while Italian sausage is a mix of shoulder and leg. The first step is to skin the leg and shoulder then set about removing the meat from the bones and then removing any sinew, ligament and large bits of fat as these will make the grinding difficult as well as potentially making the sausages naff. The fat is kept to one side as some recipes require a certain percentage of fat.
|
We cut the meat into chunky strips, about the size of your fattest finger, weigh out the amount we need for each recipe and start grinding. We start with a large grind and then go finer if the recipe demands it. If making Ventricina, the meat is cubed and not ground.
|
|
|
|
After grinding portion the meat by recipe then spread on the work surface, smother with half the ingredients and mix as well as you can by hand, almost like kneading bread. Then spread the mix out again, smother with the remaining ingredients and repeat the mix. After mixing we tend to rest the meat in a plastic food grade container in a cool room (10-12c) or in the fridge if there's room. It's important that the meat can drain so place something like a plate in the bottom of the container to keep the meat out of the liquid.
|
|
|
It's important when sausage making that the meat is as cool as possible and the grinder as well. The next day we make the sausages themselves. The casings are soaked in water for at least an hour after K has firstly untangled them and then run water through them. She swears a lot during this phase. Select the nozzle that the recipe requires, wet thoroughly and slide the skin onto the nozzle. Before tying off the end of the casing, push some meat through to almost the exit point to clear air from the nozzle. The knot must be as tight as you can tie it, do a double then fold the skin over and tie another double, this is known as a bubble knot. Leave enough string to let yourself tie the two ends of the sausage together to hang them. Now the filling. Use a steady turn and allow the sausages to fill fully keeping hands and table top wet. At the required length either twist and continue for Pork and Cider or cut and tie off again. If you intend to freeze the sausages, let them hang for a day in a cool place then bag and freeze. If drying the sausages they will need to hang for much longer which is explained in Curing and Smoking.
|
|
|
|
