Home Sausage Maker

2007-04-02T16:00:00.000-07:00

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You may also want to Visit my Other "Maker" sites for Step-By-Step Tutorials

Go to the Home Corned Beef Maker

Go to the Home Beef Jerky Maker

Go to the Home Sausage Fattie Maker

Make Sausage at Home - Let's Get Started!

2007-04-02T15:00:00.000-07:00

Home Sausage Making!

What could be better? The old saying “you never want to watch sausage being made, or what goes into it” is what drives many of us these days to make our own sausage at home. We can control cleanliness, quality, ingredients, and in the process, use our favorite spice recipes. We can readily experiment to find our own favorite combinations of meats and spices. Sometimes, you may just want to mix it up a little bit, and make up a batch of something different. The internet is full of sausage recipes from which to choose.

One thing, we, as modern world citizens never seem to have enough of, is time to do all of the things that we want to do to raise the quality of our life experiences. So with that in the back of my mind, I have made quite a number of batches of sausage, always with the thought that I could probably cut down on the number of steps involved, and save some of that precious personal time! Many of the How-To pages I have viewed on the internet seem to be slightly overly complicated, and suggest the requirement of a lot of extra tools. I’m not disrespecting any of the helpful web pages that I myself learned from…..far from it! But, I think I have distilled the whole process down to a minimum of tools, steps, and effort…… and, more importantly Less Time!

What follows is a pictorial step-by-step description of my own personal sausage making tips and tricks. I called up my good friend and Photographer Extraordinaire, Dane Tessler, and asked him if he would pictorially document the process if I could bribe him with a batch of sausage to take home. Thankfully, Dane jumped at the chance, as he and his family have many times enjoyed batches of sausage that we made together in my kitchen.

All of the photography is Copyright Dane Tessler, and may not be used in any way without written permission from Dane. While we are on the subject of copyright, all materials presented here are copyright Jerry Kneupper and may not be used without specific written consent.

Links to this URL may be posted in your Blogs and Web Sites, and are encouraged.

So, with that out of the way, let’s get started.

-=- Jerry -=-

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The Two "C"s

2007-04-02T14:00:00.000-07:00

First and foremost, are the two “C”s that should always be followed.

Clean and Cold.

Clean:

The very last thing that you want to do while making your home sausage is to make up a batch that makes you and your family sick. So, before you start, be sure that your work area and all tools are Clean. Wash them with dish soap, preferably with anti-bacterial properties. Rinse them well. The counter tops should be cleaned with a disinfectant spray. You can add a small amount of laundry bleach to your favorite spray cleaner. Keep the work surface clean as you go. Use paper towels, lots of paper towels, and frequently discard them as you go. A cloth towel will pick up bacteria and possibly just spread it around, even tho the surface may look clean. Paper towels will carry your bad bugs away to the trash can. They are much, much cheaper than a late night visit to your local emergency room.

Cold:

Keep the meats Cold. Usually your meat will be purchased and frozen until you get enough time to run your batch of sausage. Take the meat from the freezer a day or two in advance of your run. Thaw in your regular refrigerator, not out on the counter tops. The meat works best if it is still slightly frozen when you begin working with it. If you must stop working during a run, place the meat back into your refrigerator until you can re-start. You can’t be too careful. Low temperatures will retard the growth of those bad bugs.

Important: This tutorial is designed to show you how to make Fresh, Perishable Sausage Food. These sausages must be fully cooked before consumption. You should refrigerate your sausages after you make them. They will keep well for a few days under normal refrigeration. But, if you don't plan to cook and use them within a few days, you must freeze them for longer term storage. Some people have expressed concern about freezing the sausages made from previously frozen meat. Here's a link to the USDA web site where they discuss re-freezing meats.

What the USDA says about meat safety and re-freezing meats

Please use your own judgment about freezing your sausages. If in doubt, fully cook them before you package and freeze them.

-=- Jerry -=-

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You must have some Basic Tools

2007-04-02T13:00:00.000-07:00

Tools:

If you have the tools you need set out, clean, and ready to go, you will make good use of your time. One or two food grade plastic trays are inexpensive and are critical to working with your meat and finished sausages. A sharp knife, and, if you know how to use it, a sharpening steel to touch up the edge on the knife are indispensable. If you don’t know how to use a steel, either learn, or don’t use it! You can knock a good edge off your knives rather quickly with the steel. Your knife should be sharp. If the knife cuts as it should, there is less chance of a slip and an accident.

Dull knives cut their owners much more often than sharp ones! An old saying, but definitely true.

A small, inexpensive kitchen scale, stainless steel tongs, measuring cups, and a meat grinder round out your tool kit.

-=- Jerry -=-

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Beef Brisket Sausage

2007-04-02T11:00:00.000-07:00

This run will be made of Beef Brisket. I prefer either 100% Beef Brisket or a 50-50% of Beef and Pork. If you watch your local grocery store’s sales, you can usually catch Beef Brisket on at a very good sale price, especially around the National Holidays such as July 4th, where people like to smoke brisket for their long week-ends. Select the Packer Trim Brisket rather than the leaner trim. The price is cheaper, and the fat content usually (not always) works out to around 30%. These briskets are always packaged in a heavy food plastic shrink, and they freeze well for a good period of time. I like to make up my sausage run of about 10 pounds at a time. The Beef Brisket is usually packaged around 10 or 15 pounds. So select the weight that you can comfortably work with. Stock up when you find them on sale. Be sure you have freezer room!

Now is a good time to get out your spice recipe and the spices, and prepare the spice mix for the amount of meat that you will be grinding. Tip: My favorite spice mix is calibrated for 50 pounds of meat. I find it hard to mentally break up all the measurements by 20% for 10 pounds of meat, so I usually make up the full spice recipe, then split it 5 ways and make up small Food Saver packages of the spices, ready for 10 pound batches. The vacuum packs keep the spices fresh between batch runs, and I always make sure I have a spice pack ready to go before I start a run.

Speaking of Food Saver Packaging, this would be a good time to cut the bags from the Food Saver roll, and seal the bottom end with the Food Saver machine.

I have a Friskars rotary cutter for my photography work, and I find that it works very well to get straight 90 degree cuts of the bag material.

This is also a good time to get out the casings and wash them and start them soaking in fresh water. Clean and soak them as per the directions on the packaging. I use hog casings for the size sausage that I prefer. They come packaged in salt brine. I use a plastic container with a tight fitting lid to store the casings and brine solution. I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary to store them in the refrigerator, but I adhere to my caution of Cold, so they are always in the refrigerator at my house.

-=- Jerry -=-

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Cube the Meat and Add Spices

2007-04-02T10:00:00.000-07:00

You are ready to start processing the meat. Open the Brisket package in one of your food trays. Catch all of the juices and discard the plastic wrap. Set up a clean cutting board or cutting mat and slice the brisket into “steaks” about ¾ inches thick. The thickness really depends on the size of your meat grinder. If you have a real powerful one, you can make the slices thicker and avoid a small bit of work. Tip: You might want to ask your supermarket butcher to slice the Brisket up for you into the steaks. This would be a time saver for you. Just make sure that the butcher packages your meats well for the freezer if you plan to keep it frozen for any length of time. I prefer to open the package myself and save the juices. It’s up to you.

Now, trim the fat off each steak, and cube up the fat and beef to chunks that will work well with your meat grinder. This is where the finely sharpened knife really comes into play. Sharp and flexible can make quick work of this task. As you can see, I prefer to use a fish filet knife, but any knife that you have will work for you. Arrange the fat and beef in separate piles in the tray. When you have the entire Brisket sliced up into cubes, weigh each pile and keep track of how much fat and beef you have by weight. This measurement is not critical; you just want to know approximately what percentages of fat to lean you

have to work with. If you read the ingredients on a few “store bought” sausage packages at the local supermarket, you will find that most of them quote roughly 35% fat. I personally prefer about 30% fat to lean, Dane, however likes his somewhere between 20 and 30% of fat. This is your chance to make up your own ratio. You are only going for a ballpark mixture percent, it is not critical in any way. That’s the reason that the cheap little kitchen scale is very adequate for the job. So either remove fat to keep and freeze for your next batch, or add some fat that you had stored from previous batch runs. If you deal with a real butcher at your meat market, he will usually give you some beef or pork fat for free, to have in reserve in your freezer for your mix. One of the nice things about the Packer Trim Beef Brisket is that they are usually about 30-35% fat to lean right out of the package. So, you could just cube it up and grind it without measuring it. It's a sure thing, you can’t go too wrong. I’d still cut the fat and lean up separately in order to get the fat mixed in more evenly prior to grinding. The reason I say this is usually on a Brisket, one end or the other has very thick fat and the other is much thinner. Bottom line, you want your sausages to be a good even mix.

Mix the fat and lean with your hands or any tool of your choice. I prefer to use the stainless steel tongs. It keeps my hands cleaner and you can shift things around easily. Once you have the meat spread out evenly, sprinkle your spices over the meat as evenly as you can. I keep a spice shaker with large holes for this job. Add and mix the spices to the meats in 4 or 5 passes, mixing the meat up thoroughly between spice applications.

Your grinder is not a good mixer, you want the spices well mixed

prior to grinding so that you don’t have any heavy or light concentrations of spice in the final product.

Finally, add about 1/2 cup of liquid. Water, Wine, Beer, a liquid of your choice. Mix thoroughly!

-=- Jerry -=-

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Let's Grind some Sausage!

2007-04-02T09:00:00.001-07:00

Now get out the meat grinder and set it up. Load the casing onto the stuffer tube. You may want to put a bit of vegetable or olive cooking oil on the tube to make loading the casing easier. Usually if the tube is wet, the casing will load up easily.

Tie off the end of the casing with a simple knot.

Here is where you are going to save the most precious Life Time over the methods that most other sausage makers advocate. My personal preference for linked sausage is a very coarsely ground meat. I really don’t like the finely ground meats that you get from multiple passes thru the grinder. So, I don’t advocate making an initial grind, and then go back and grind and stuff on a second pass. My preferred way is to grind and stuff in the case in a single pass. I also choose to use my grinder’s coarsest grind plate, but you may find that you prefer to use a smaller hole size. You will find your preference after a few batches. I also twist the links as they are filled from the stuffer. Twist in alternating directions for each link. At the end of your casing, tie another simple knot.

When you have your sausage stuffed into casings, you can either leave them connected or snip them apart. It's a matter of how you plan to use and store your sausage links. You may want to hang them in a smoker, so you would not want to separate them at this point.

-=- Jerry -=-

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Package for the Freezer

2007-04-02T08:00:00.002-07:00

I like to package and freeze the links as a fresh product. I usually grill them on my charcoal grill, so they get plenty of smoke at that time.

For my family usage, packing 6 links per freezer package is just right. I load the links into the Food Saver Bags, vacuum and seal them. Be sure to mark by meat, spice type, and most importantly the date you made them. I have no idea how long they will keep in the freezer packaged this way, as we use them up on a pretty regular basis. You can follow directions in the Food Saver user manual for good results.

If you have concerns about freezing the sausages that you may have made from previously frozen meat, review what the USDA says about re-freezing meats.

USDA Web Site on meat safety

Please use your own judgment about freezing your sausages.

If in doubt, fully cook them before you package and freeze them.

-=- Jerry -=-

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Reward Yourself!

2007-04-02T07:00:00.000-07:00

Here's one final tip. Your grind plates will rust rapidly. Be sure to dry them completely. Store them in a zip lock plastic bag, with a light coating of olive oil or other cooking oil. Instead of using an oil, you could place some uncooked rice in the bag to absorb moisture. As you started, end by cleaning all of your tools.

Don't forget the Two "C"s.

Last but not least, and probably the most fun part of the whole process, is to reward yourself by cooking up a couple of links. Don’t forget that when you clean the meat grinder the fresh meats in the auger section will make a good reward taste too.

Enjoy!

-=- Jerry -=-

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