Sausage making is considered an art form.
The art of homemade sausage making allows you to give the final product a personal touch in addition to controlling the meat quality, fat content and flavor. Italian sausage or polish sausage form the core of most recipes for homemade sausage, but sausages can be made from a variety of spiced meats. You can opt for short instead of long links or fat sausages as opposed to slim sausages. A kitchen helper may come in handy, as it is helpful to have a second pair of hands for stuffing ground sausage into casings.
Prepping the Casing
Pork casings work best for sausage, according to North Dakota State University Agriculture and University Extension. When you purchase natural pork casings, most often the casing comes salted. You may want to rinse the casing under the facet and run water through the casing to ensure that the lining of the casing does not have any holes. Then the casings need to be soaked for at least 30 minutes, according to the university extension service, to remove some of the salt content and to soften them. If the casing becomes too soft, throw it out. However, leftover casing can be stored in a container tightly packed with salt.
Prepping for Stuffing
Sausage links can come in different sizes.
Once you prepare the casings and grind the meat, you can begin to fill the sausage casings. Many sausage makers suggest that it is a two-person job: one to control the speed of the meat coming through the grinder and a second to hold the casing and control the filling process. Sausagemania.com recommends people making sausage at home should opt for longer sausage tubes, which cuts down on the number of times the sausage links need to be tied off. Many websites recommend using a grinder with a funnel attachment, also known as a stuffing tube or sausage horn. Before slipping the casing onto the tube, coat the funnel with pork fat.
Stuffing
Fresh sausage can be refrigerated for two to three days.
Sausagemania.com recommends using a straight stuffing tube that is at least 8 inches long. In addition, how you pack the grinder can affect the stuffing process. When the grinder is packed full, it reduces the need to stop or reload in the middle of stuffing, which can reduce or prevent air pockets forming inside the casing. You can also reduce or prevent air pockets by feeding the meat through the grinder steadily and slowly and by grasping the top of the casing firmly around the tube, cutting off one way air enters the sausage casing.
Though timing is the key to deciding when to make a new sausage link, using a sausage tube allows you to make a new link each time the meat stops feeding into the tube. This will ensure uniform-size links, which make for easier cooking. When you want to make a new sausage link, hold the sausage between your index finger and thumb. Sausage makers suggest twisting the casing four times between each link. Tying butcher's string between each link may help to prevent the sausage from coming apart during cooking. For fresh sausages, refrigerating immediately afterward is key.
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