The Super Sausage

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A couple or three years ago I bought the house a Christmas present which has turned out to be the best thing I ever bought. It was the gift of a sausage making machine, only the basic manual one because you never know if you are going to get on with it. How many people buy pasta makers or bread makers at Christmas and use them once or twice before losing interest?

It’s a relatively simple machine, just a hand cranked thing that is both a mincer and with the aid of an attachment a stuffer. It’s not a quick process to make sausages. You need to prepare the meat by removing sinews and connective tissue, dice the meat, cool the meat, mince it, add your desired seasoning and breadcrumbs/water, fry a small bit off to taste and adjust the seasoning, and only then stuff the skins. It does take a couple of hours to do, but the results are amazing. We do end up with sausages that are 90% meat, preservative free, low in salt and that taste absolutely fabulous compared to any you can get from the shops, and probably better than the premium ones you get from a butcher. We only use shoulder and belly of pork in the mix.

Sometime we’ll upgrade and get an electric one.

We probably make a batch of sausages or so every month, we give some to family and friends, and there are always sausages in the freezer. We are a dab hand at Lincolnshire, jerk seasoning, wild garlic and chilli/onion. We’ve tried spicy barbecue, pork and mustard and thai (chilli, lemongrass and spring onion) as well. Lamb and rosemary is a lot more effort as the meat contains more connective tissue.

It’s at this point that the allotment comes in handy. No I haven’t suddenly started rearing pigs on the allotment, but the herbs, onions, chillies, spring onions and wild garlic all come in handy. And most of the breadcrumbs come from home-made bread as well.

I planted 50 or so chilli plants and most of them are producing, this is just a selection …

One of the chillis had been nibbled by a slug, we breed them really tough up here! In the end I picked the chilli, cut off the nibbled bit and ate the rest, quite mild yet, but it is very young.

Last year we made chipolata sausages for Christmas (both lamb and pork as we have a friend who won’t eat pork – luckily for him the chipolata skins are from sheep), and gave them away as presents as well. We did warn people beforehand about the sausages in their parcels.

We even held a 2 day sausage and beer festival around my birthday (we never call it a barbecue, because as soon as you mention the b word in a future tense, usually with the words tomorrow, weekend or next week, then it will rain). So we planned and held a 2 day sausage festival where all the sausages were home made and all the beer I supplied came from what we lovingly call our local ‘Off Licence’ of to give it it’s proper name ‘The Black Sheep Brewery’, just down the road in Masham. Well if people are going to travel from all over the country to get here they deserve good stuff.

It’s well worth the effort of making your own sausages if you can, just for the simple fact of knowing what goes in to it. If you do then try and get natural casings, they are easier to use than synthetic ones, and don’t split as easily when being cooked.

And for those that want to put it in their diary, National Sausage Week in the UK is the 2nd to the 8th November 2009. If anyone would like to guess what we are having for dinner that week then please feel free, but I wouldn’t like to spoil the surprise.

• 8 Aug, 2009
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