We’ve been pretty lucky to have a new butcher open up a few blocks from our house that carries pork and grass-fed beef from local farm, makes some awesome sausage and charcuterie, and has quickly become my fountain of all meat knowledge. Inspired by all the goodness coming out of that place, I decided to do what any other normal curious home cook would do, make my own sausage. With 4th of July around the corner, I decided this would be the perfect time to embark on my sausage making adventure.
I referred to my handy sausage making bible, Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing to get the gist of how to start this project and it came down to needing three things: the meat (and spice), casings, and a sausage stuffer. I knocked out the first two with a quick call to the butcher and then ordered a the sausage stuffer attachment for our kitchen aid mixer.
I won’t go into the nitty-gritty detail of all the different steps, except to say that I followed everything the recipes told me to do and at the end of it, I had five pounds of sausage! I did quickly realize that the kitchen aid sausage stuff tool is really sucks, so I went out and bought a better one on the advice of our friendly neighborhood butcher.
At the end of the day, is sausage one of those things that you would put on the list to make instead of buy? I’d say hell yes! Once you do it a few times, you can get the whole thing done in 30 minutes – worth it all the way.
