Sausages

So Saturday I finally made home-made sausages. I had bought 13.5 pounds of pork shoulder at Costco and I picked up sausage casings at McGinnis's so I was ready. For a long time I had had the equipment: my KitchenAid mixer, the food grinder attachment and the sausage stuffing accessory. I'm not sure what I was waiting for. Maybe inspiration from a simple recipe, which I found in Rosetta Constantino's My Calabria.
It was very simple with sweet paprika, hot paprika, salt, fennel seeds and ground pork. Constantino's mother says that if your hands aren't red after mixing the sausage meat, you don't have enough paprika.


Our first attempt at stuffing wasn't so great, we were using a little funnel for stuffing them and they resulted in rather wimpy sausages. So we compacted the sausage meat so they looked decent and then changed the funnel to the wider one so that more stuffing would be extruded. It was always difficult to find the opening for the casing since they were really thin. But if you fill the 3 foot casing with water, it's easier to gather it up around the funnel mouth.





These are the hog casings soaking in cold water. They came in 3 foot lengths, tied together. You gather the hog casing up around the funnel mouth, turn the mixer on high speed, and start pushing the sausage meat through the grinder.

You need two people to fill the sausages. One to push the meat through the grinder and the other to gradually pull out the casing. After the first string of sausages, we were almost experts!

And yes, we were very proud!