Sausage Party

This was a fun weekend. So much meat for me to manhandle. Porking, porking, porking.

Yesterday morning I woke up and headed downstairs and started pulling my meat...out of the refrigerator so I could cut it up. Thus began the sausage making process. My lady friend arrived a few hours later after a quick stop at the supermarket and she had with her a nine pound pork shoulder. I set about to butchering that sucker up too. Snicker-snack went the knives and after a while of (fun, but occasionally tedious) slicing and dicing nine pounds of bone-in pork shoulder had become five pounds of clean pork, one pound of skin and fat, three and a half pounds of bone, and half a pound of slimy gristle.

Soon, I had a bowl filled with roughly six pounds of lean pork meat. Next I added in a pound of sliced up pork fat and churned up the fatty, meaty mixture and brought out Gertrude. She is a bulldog composed of roughly fifteen pounds of flat gray metal power. She's a hungry beast and I ram a feeding tube onto her and jam all this meat and fat through it and watch her chew. It. Up.
Ok, so Gertrude is a Kitchenaid mixer. But she is gorgeous and not only kneads up bread dough but the grinder attachment churns meat into sausage in no time.

Well, that's not true. The meat was ground but the mixture- which was divided into roughly 1/2 pound fat to 3 pounds pork was not sausage. The next step on the road: Seasoning. We decided to try making breakfast sausage and a batch of Italian sweet sausage. We had recipes but while my lady friend likes following recipes to the letter, I'm prone to riffing. Like the Pirate Code, the recipe can be more of a set of guidelines. Arrr! Uh, sorry.

Anyway, we separated the meat mix into two bowls and seasoned each according to the respective recipes, with some substitutions according to what herbs and spices were on hand- No coriander seeds? Fine, we'll grind up some star anise and maybe add a dash of cumin. Hmm, no, lets not since cumin is pretty strong. So no cumin in the Italian mix. And during this mixing process we had a hot skillet on the stove in which we would toss in a bit of the seasoned meat mixture to cook up and then taste. Not only did this provide us a little snack during the cooking process but we could test our sausage progress. I don't believe I just wrote that. Therefore I'm keeping it in the blog.

The Italian stuff seemed to finally work. But geez, there's something missing from the breakfast sausage. And I'd already tossed in some rosemary not because it was called for but just because I like the flavor in sausage. And there were both sage and marjoram (called for by the recipe) and brown sugar- hey! It didn't taste sweet enough. Yeah! Breakfast sausage, especially if it isn't already maple flavored, needs to taste sweet and smooth on its own but also act as a perfect vehicle for that extra maple syrup left from your pancakes or waffles. But the first meat mix was positively begging for extra sweetness. Since we had no maple syrup we added more brown sugar (all amounts were guesstimated since we were dealing with proportions larger than those described in the recipes- coloring outside the lines once again). Smoosh smoosh, sizzle, taste...Bingo!

And then the stuffing.
Sausage stuffing is fun. It is also a odd couples activity. It went like this, "Ok honey, I'll load the raw meat into the tube. Great. Now, I'm...ungh, ok, I jammed the tube in place. It's locked in. Ok, you've got the crank ready? Great. Turn it and lets press the air out of the cavity. Oh! No! Wait! You're going to fast...there, yeah, the slow setting. Ok, yeah, the stuffing is...there it goes through the hole. Keep feeding me, I've got the skins ready. Slower, slowslow! Ok, I can take it faster now. Niiiice, I'm getting used to this speed. Wait, oh too much there. That's it. We've got it now. Good, oh...what? you're all out? Ok, lets get set for the next round."

No, I'm not exaggerating. Making sausage in a kitchen sounds like the dialog above. Just picture saying the words while your hands are covered with a thin layer of pork fat. To those of you who aren't used to skinning animals in the wild, it is better than you might think. And we did it for two batches of sausages. The pleasant surprise is that after two rounds of stuffing we had two batches of roughly a dozen links of sausages. And they looked good! Into the fridge went out made meat and off we went to sleep.

This evening was the test. How would the sausage hold up to cooking and more importantly, eating? I think the experiment was successful. Several hours ago we cooked four links of out Italian style sausage and then tossed it with a mix of cherry tomatoes, red bell pepper, homemade bowtie pasta and some basil, parsley, grated cheese and lemon juice. The result was very tasty and best yet, we are exhibiting no signs of food poisoning or any food-borne illness. I call this progress. I call this a successful experiment.

We've put all the extra in the freezer and you can't have none.

Ok, ask nice and I'll think about slipping you some of my sausage.