Don’t worry, I won’t show you how the legislation gets made.

While driving, one of the audiobooks I had on to make the miles go easier was one on the detection of food fraud. Far from putting me off food, it made me think about things I wanted to try cooking. One of the things I’d never done was make my own sausages. I needed a few things to even try. Obviously meat and spices, but I lacked a meat grinder and sausage casings. Since I had a stand mixer that’s served me for the past fifteen years, I figured I’d get the meat grinder attachment for that machine, and check my local butcher to see if they sold sausage casings. Turns out that they do, $8.99 for a package… which is apparently the entire small intestine of a pig. Admittedly, it was cleaned and the butchers buy these in bulk for their own sausages.

Three Different Animals – Cow, Elk, Pig

Supplies secured, I just needed to actually start doing it. I had an elk flank steak in the freezer that had sat there for a long time, and it was wrong to just leave it forever. Half a pound of elk wasn’t going to make that much, and after some though decided to bulk it up with some flatiron steak and throw in bacon for fat. Each of these were beautiful peices of meat in their own right, and I felt a little bad about what I was about to do. Still, I’d committed and cut them into smaller chunks that could be fed into the grinder.

Into the bowl with the chopped meat, I added the seasoning – Onion, Salt, Pepper, and Fennel seeds. Here’s a picture to prove that I actually did include the seasoning, as for whatever reason, you lot like to slander my taste.

Spices!

Realizing I would need a second bowl to catch the grind while the first bowl was occupied with the yet to be ground meat, I grabbed one at random. Only it turned out to be the inner pot of the Instant Pot. Oh well, it is functionally identical to a bowl for my purposes.

The grinder itself feels like aluminum except for the grind plates proper, which have the weightiness of steel. If that auger were anything but aluminum, it would be heavier. Admittedly, it does need to be light enough to hang on the end of the stand mixer. There were three different diameter grind plates included with the attachment, and my first thought was that I would need to go through all three down to the smallest of the lot. I started at the coarse plate, and the onions came out all but unchanged on the other side. So I fed it through the medium plate, and what came out was close to the consistancy of regular store-bought ground meats.

Not-so Daily Grind.

I noticed that the rate which the ground meat came out was directly controllable by the amount of pressure I applied to the feed end. At the time this was just a curiousity that I didn’t think would be that big a deal. It would be important later.

For the most part, nothing I’d done was all too strange for anyone who’s cooked meat or used a food processer. Now the time came to switch out the grind plate for the stuffing horn. I don’t know if that’s what it’s really called, but I don’t care. As I mentioned, the casing I got from the butcher was a natural casing, the cleaned small intestine membrane of a pig. Having had sausages so often, I simply told myself that I had no right to even pretend to claim squeamishness at this. It turns out the pep talk wasn’t needed. All of my thoughts were about how to actually get the casing on the horn, and how much I would need.

The new task,

The first, most joyous thing was that the packaging contained a plastic strip down the middle that was folded in half and provided a way to get the casing on the horn without much fuss. Now, the butcher shop doubtlessly uses industrial hardware, meaning they could put the whole thing on at once, grab the plastic loop, and pull the liner out. The home cook, with a much more space-conscious setup has to coax some of the casing over to the horn and decide when to just trim it off, since there’s no way the whole intestine will fit.

The texture and inner friction made it impossible to work the sausage casing while wearing gloves. I had to work it bare handed. As I did so, I debated all the juvenile jokes I knew the commentariat would be making when this section was discussed. I’m not going to be able to stop you even if I tried…

Anyway, once the casing was on the horn and snipped, I tied the end as advised, then poked a small hole to let the air out as I began filling. I intentionally had not been emptying out the grinder between steps because I didn’t want to waste the meat I knew was in the auger between steps. So the first link got chunks that were only coarse-ground, while the later links got the finer second grind meat. So the first link looks a little wonky. About every six inches or so, I twisted the sausages, switching direction of twist each time. At first I was confused at this instruction, but when I was doing it, I realized that by twisting the opposite direction each time, the previous twist gets tightened rather than undone. Also, during the sausage stuffing process, that detail about the feed pressure controlling the speed at which the meat comes out was suddenly very useful. Since I had almost complete control over the feed, I never lost control of the links, and was able to retain fairly even consistancy, despite the machine moving even as I loaded more meat into the hopper.

I can’t believe it’s really sausages.

When I got to the end, there was still ground meat in the auger, but there was nothing to push it out from behind, so I wrapped up the sausages proper and began disassembling the grinder. I very carefully salvaged as much of the meat from the horn and grinder as I could, as it was still perfectly good at this point. There was about a link’s worth that hadn’t made it into casings.

Up to this point, I had adopted a clean as you go strategy so that I wouldn’t be faced with a daunting cleaning task when I finished. But, the disassembled grinder basically had to be done all together. It was surprisingly easy to clean, breaking down into sufficently simple pieces that I could get to all the components with relatively straightforward methods. The brush that came with it helped scrub the main body as it was designed to, so I had a clean grinder not long after I’d finished with it. The most difficult step was coaxing the last of the meat out of the stuffing horn.

Of course, I had to find out how it tasted, so I separated the last two links from the chain and pan-fried them, storing the rest of it for later meals. It was after I cut open the link to see the interior that I realized I could have gone with the coarse grind as a filling and not been too bothered. But this worked just fine.

Yes, it was delicious, though lacked some color on the inside.