Eating Healthier in Today's World

THE BEST OF THE WURST

Making sausage at home seems to become a lost art, which is a shame since it is easy to do and yields a wonderful tasty reward when you are finished.  At this time of the year we get all kinds of inquiries about making home-made sausages.  The hunters have some fresh meat and everyone is doing as the animals are doing, preparing for the long Canadian winters right now.  Others who have farms have some extra pork or beef that they want to use to make some sausages as well.   Making sausages is an easy and tasty way of utilizing that extra meat as well as some of the less expensive cuts of beef and pork that we can pick up at the grocery stores.  Sausages that are purchased, especially ones in packaged, have had a lot of extra fat included with them and have been usually treated with preservatives.  Making your own gives you the control as to what goes into the sausage, and generally has a better fresher taste and can be much lower in fats, then any pre-packaged ones you can buy.

"Good sausage is all about balance. Balance of salt and savory, balance of meat and fat, balance of spices and herbs within the whole. Knowing a proper ratio of salt to meat (and fat) is essential, but once you understand it you can adjust to your own perception of saltiness, which varies wildly among people. Some sort of liquid helps tighten the bind when you mix the sausage meat; and without this bind you have hamburger, not sausage. You also need a proper amount of fat, at least 20 percent – I have not yet met a low-fat sausage worth eating."   Only your imagination limits the possibilities of the different ingredients and spices that can be added to the meat to make the sausages taste different.  What liquid to use? Anything from water to fruit juice to wine to cream. What sort of meat? Usually pork, but beef and lamb are also good, as are game animals.  Throw in some apple chunks or grind some dried cranberries into the mixture.   Do you want a fine grind or a coarse one? How much fat? I like 25-30 percent, but you could go as high as 50 percent.

I have always thought of making sausages as one of the easiest and fun tasks our Bosch Universal Plus machines can do.  We simple grind the meat and any other items you wish to add, (onions, garlic, bread crumbs or even spices), mix all the ingredients in the Bosch Universal Plus bowl with the dough hook, and then put the mixture through meat grinder with the sausage stuffer with the sausage casing on it.  In fact I have done a video where I am making Bratwurst (recipe attached) that you can see here. 

 Click here for sausage making demonstration

To Stuff or Not to Stuff?

If you are going to  stuff your sausages, you will need to find some sausage casings. Most decent butchers make their own sausages and will sell you hog casings, which are the scrubbed, salted intestines of a pig. (Don’t feed these sausages to those who cannot eat pork! . Some people like the synthetic collagen casings you can buy on the internet. I do not. Why bother with this? The stuffing process compresses the meat and fat mixture and integrates the flavours better than in loose sausage – it is why most professionals prefer sausages in links.  You can also get Lamb casings if you wish.  You can usually buy them from the butcher in HANKS, which is a couple of pounds of frozen casing packed in salt.  To use it you cut off the amount you need and soak it in warm water to remove all the salt.  We also like to run about 1/4 cup of warm water through the casing to clean them inside as well as out.  It doesn't really matter what casing you purchase as they all stretch to fit whatever size of sausage stuffer you are planning to use.  Sausages can also be made and frozen as patties, which will have all the same flavours as the stuffed sausages without using the casings at all.  These are wonderful to whip out of the freezer and into the microwave to thaw and then cook up for a hearty breakfast.

 Click here for Turkey Cranberry Sausage and Bratwurst Sausage Recipes

Sausage Making Tips and Tricks 

 1. First, you need a good meat grinder. We use the Bosch Universal Plus meat grinder attachment. Stand-alone meat grinders are good, too, and you could even use one of the old hand-cranked grinders. You need at least two dies – coarse and fine –(the one that comes with the Bosch meat grinder will make a fine grind so if you want a coarser grind you will need a #8 or #6 mm disc)  that dictate how wide the strands of ground meat will be when they emerge from the grinder. You will also need measuring cups and spoons or even a scale to weight the meat. Precision matters!

2. Start by making sure the meat and fat is extremely cold by putting it in the freezer for an hour or two. You can even use fat straight from the freezer, as frozen fat cuts better. Why the emphasis on temperature? Think of it like pie dough, where you want the butter to stay separate from the dough – if the butter gets too hot, it ruins it. Same with sausage. You really, really want to avoid “smear.”  A good way to tell if your sausage meat and fat are cold enough is if your hands start to hurt and go numb while handling it. You are looking for as close to 32 degrees as you can get without actually freezing the meat – using pre-frozen meat is fine, but you if you then refreeze it, it will suffer greatly in quality.  I like to cut the meat into strips and then chill it in the freezer, as it goes through the meat grinder really easily and usually I don't need to use the pusher.This carries through to your equipment. Put your bowls and your grinder in the freezer or at least the refrigerator for at least an hour before using them. I can’t say it enough: Think Cold! 

3.  Grind all the meat and any onions and/or garlic or any other harder food type items through the coarser grind disc on the meat grinder.  If you want to make a finer sausage you can re-grind it on the finer disc afterwards.  Place the meat mixture and the remainder of your ingredients in the Bosch bowl with the dough hook and turn it on for 30 seconds or so, to thoroughly mix ( but not mush) the ingredients.  This is where we usually add the binder to the sausage meat which can be bread or cracker crumbs, flour or even oatmeal.  The binder is one of the ingredients that hold the sausage together along with the liquid.  We also add our liquid that we are using as well at this point and let mix in a few more seconds.

4.  You can make different size sausages, so select your stuffer size to coordinate with the type of sausage you are making.  For example if you are making a breakfast sausage, you may want to use a small sausage stuffer (1/2"size) but if you are doing a salami type sausage you would use the larger 1 1/4 "size stuffer.  The Bosch Universal Sausage stuffers come in a package with 3 sizes in it to choose. 

5.  Cut the desired amount of casing you wish to make into sausage and make certain you have run some water through it as this helps lubricate it to thread on the sausage stuffer.  Simply thread the casing onto the stuffer and pull all the casing onto it.  If is very important at this time to put a small amount of the sausage meat slowly through the meat grinder to the very end of the sausage stuffer in order to get any air expounded out of the system first before tying a small knot at the end of the casing.

6. While stuffing the sausages, it is good to have a feeder and a catcher.  One person is feeding the sausage meat into the meat grinder and the other person is catching the sausage making certain is lands on your cookie sheet and that it is not stuffed tightly.  You need to make the links in the sausages and if they are packed too tightly you will not be able to do this without bursting the casing.  The catcher will find it easiest to coil the long sausage to be able to handle it the best way.

7. After you finished with all the stuffing it takes only a few minutes to go along the length of the sausage and pinch it into link and twist the links.  We twist every second sausage as we go along and that twists them all at both ends.  You then can hang your sausages in a cool place to set for an hour or two, however, I like to par-boil them for a few minutes and then drain them.  You can then freeze them or cook them up in the next few days.  If you choose to hang the sausages, make certain that they don't touch each other.  It helps them set better.  You can then freeze them for future use. YUM!!

Here are some of our favorite sausage recipes including American Farm Sausage, Irish Sausage and Hungarian Sausage.