Home-made Sausage Recipe

Ingredients

1 kg Minced pork shoulder

0.5 kg Minced belly pork

250 gm breadcrumbs

200 ml water

15gm Salt

Sausage skins* (known as “casings”) to the trade

Spices

·         Chilli

·         Juniper

·         Black Peppercorns

·         Pink Pepper corns

·         Mace or nutmeg

Method

Take a skein of “casings” and rinse off the preserving salt in a generous quantity of cold water, wash through with warm water, then soak them in warm water until ready for use.

In a large bowl mix the pork meat until fully blended, best using clean hands.

Everyone who makes sausages has their own taste as to the blend of spices they prefer.  I’m not going to set out a mix to follow, experiment for yourselves.  I’ll just offer one tip, go easy to begin with especially with the salt and chilli.

The peasant ladies who live here in Ibiza, where I live, make sausages the traditional way, and gradually add their spice mix to their “family” taste by blending and tasting, blending and tasting repeatedly until they decide that the flavour is correct.  Each time they’ve made an addition and its been mixed in, they take samples from different parts of the bulk mix and form the samples into a small patty and then fry it.  The cooked patty is then broken into pieces and handed round to the gathering of butchers and mixers to taste and for their opinion, but only when Grandma has given things the final nod is the decision sealed! Collective decision making at its rural best!

Put your choice of spices in an electric “coffee” grinder together with the salt and grind to a fine powder, then add it to the water and finally mix the ‘brew’ well, into the pork mix.  At this point the mixture will be quite ‘loose’ as the posh TV chefs say, I’d rather say sloppy!  Add the breadcrumbs and mix until the whole combination has become homogenous.

The next step is to stuff the meat into the casings.  For this you will need an electric mincing machine fitted with a sausage stuffing nozzle (they’re usually supplied from new) or If you don’t have one you can easily find one on eBay or Amazon.

N.B.

Do NOT fit the mincer blades whilst stuffing the casings or you’ll end up with a skin full of pink mush!

Give the casings a final rinse whilst removing them from their soaking water, then load them carefully on to the stuffing nozzle and tie a knot in the open end of the casing.  It’s a bit tricky, rather like fitting a massive slippery condom! 

Load the feed tray with pork mix, pushing the meat well down into the screw mechanism, set the machine going and get ready for the action.  If you have a choice of speed on the mincer, start on slow until you get the hang of things, otherwise it’ll seem as if a massive python has jumped on to your kitchen worktop!

As the meat passes through the nozzle it will gradually emerge into the casing, as it does, gently slide more casing along the length of the nozzle to allow meat to feed into it freely and evenly.  At this stage allow the sausage to fill gradually and evenly, don’t worry too much if the shape isn’t 100% even, that can be rectified later.  Keep feeding meat into the mincer’s feed tray until all of it has been used and you have a huge length of sausages on your worktop.

Lastly smooth out any lumps and bumps in the filled casing before deciding how big you want each sausage to be.  Simply take the filled casing and give it three or four twists, where you want each sausage to be, then move on to the next.  10 - 12 cm in length and 70/90 gms in weight makes a good “manageable” sausage for most people and most dishes, from grilled breakfast bangers, to Toad in the Hole.  Finally decide how many sausages your likely to want for meals, six or eight will feed a family of three well, so then cut the skein into appropriate lengths or “hanks”.

Now put the finished sausages into a glass or stainless-steel tray or bowl and put it into the fridge overnight, so that the sausage can mature a little.  It was a surprise to me, first time round, how much of the added water comes out.  It is perfectly safe to freeze sausages that have been made hygienically, from fresh meat, and now is the time to do it, immediately and straight from the fridge. 

Take hanks of sausages and put them into new, labelled and dated “ziplok” bags.  Immerse the bags into a bowl of water to expel as much air as possible, seal and set aside repeating until all the hanks have been dealt with.  Put the bagged sausages, widely spread into multiple freezer drawers, to ensure the quickest possible cooling and freezing!

I’m lucky I have a domestic vac-pak machine for this job, its absolutely indispensable to me for all sorts of applications and cheap as chips.  It saves me a fortune just in not wasting leftovers!  I got mine on Amazon from the Andrew James company.

Last of all, and being a Yorkshireman, I ask myself, what must I do with the sausage mix that is left in the mincer?  I certainly can’t waste it, no, no horror of horrors!  So scrape it all out and on a clean surface roll it out into a sausage shape (no, I don’t try to fit it into a skin :o), I’m hardly that daft) then using shop bought puff pastry I make sausage rolls, with it yummie!

* You can get the casings at a very fair price, by post from a delightful supplier called Weschenfelder in Middlesbrough weschenfelder.co.uk  they're super helpful to home cooks.