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Sausage Making
It seems that everyone starts by worrying about what is outside the sausage.
Most butchers will sell you sausage casings, (apparently you never call them
'skins'). It seems silly to use plastic skins when you're hand making,
so choose natural casings. The British websites seem strong on not using er, skins but
'packages' wrapped in
caul fat. (Which may be harder to find but your butcher will tell you when
they have some available and it freezes well. Just thaw and soften it properly
or it breaks).
 If
you have a hand mincer, or an attachment for your kitchen mixer/blender that
gets the grinding of the meat sorted, then you need to stuff the casings. Hand
stuffing using a funnel is slow work, if your benchtop mixer doesn't have a
sausage attachment, look for a device like this
Sunbeam MultiMincer RRP $179 that has an adjustable stuffing nozzle.
More important is what's inside the casing.
Choosing the seasoning, and whether you add breadcrumbs or keep 100% meat is the most important decision. Cereals
(and coarse breadcrumbs) do add useful texture used in moderation.
Most spices start with salt and pepper. French sausages use quatre-epices (four
spices) which is around 3/4 pepper and equal parts of cloves, ginger and nutmeg.
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Here's a recipe for
Italian salsiccia
from Clifford Wright. Just avoid the commercial mixed 'flavourings' or you'll
get er, commercial tasting sausages. Fresh is best.
Remember if you're going to start, you will have to experiment and modify your recipes but produce something like our cover picture at your next barbecue and you'll be the star.
Links
There is an Australian site that turns up tops in Google but seems limited in
its material. Greg and
Pete's Sausage site. Maintained by a couple of keen smoked sausage fans.
There is a
Sausage WebRing of various valued sites
The favourite is a
British sausage making site, it also covers salami making, smoking and curing. sausagemaking.org This
site has a forum as well and they dispatch equipment and spices to Australia.
If you're getting serious...
Foodquip have small
electric Reber meat mincers from around $470, and Reber manual sausage fillers
from $255 as well as their commercial range.
(Tell them Regional Food sent you).
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