I’ve made my own sausage in the past. But this was done in small batches. A few months ago, my friend and I decided to try to make 50 meters of sausage. Yes, an Olympic pool length of sausage. The first step to all this was to try to find casing. Yes, we used real intestine lining for casing. Sure finding casing for a small batch is easy but finding 50 meters started to become difficult. Luckily, Amazon has sausage casings. Now, the second thing was to check up on my sausage stuffer. All the parts were there so that worked out. Finally, what kind of sausage to make. At this point, I’m realizing that we’ll need about 25 pounds of meat and other ingredients. Oh, we also bought lamb casings. Lamb casings are smaller (think breakfast sausage).
We figured out the type of sausage, bought the ingredients, and started making sausage.
The good, the bad, and the ugly (just some tips)
- Make sure you mix your ingredients well.
- If possible, have your butcher grind all your meat for you.
- Fat, yes you need fat. At least by making sausage, you can control the amount.
- Salt, yes you need a lot of salt. Sure you can control it but if you don’t add any, you’re stuck with a piece of cardboard.
- Skin, tiny bits of skin in your sausage will give it a great texture.
- Blood sausage, tastes great. Making it can make the stomach churn.
- Thread twine inside the casing before soaking them in water. This helps you later when you put the casing on the stuffer.
All of this worked out. However, we did not reach the 50 meter mark. We got up to 45 meters or so and then just got tired of cleaning out clogs in the Kitchen Aid grinder/sausage attachment. In a semi-perfect world, I think we should have gone with a vertical stuffer.
Other than that, we had many sausages about 70. I can’t wait till we try this again.
