Home Made Sausage, Cured, and Smoked Meats - Page 3

Yes.

Eh? How about just boxing up a six pack of those and sending them my way? I don't have time to do the work.

Ok, I'm into this. I just got my first sausage maker. I'm looking for a straight forward recipe for a basic tasty sausage. Any reccs?

Impressive Pio. Very nice.

I assume the purpose of the cold is for antibacterial purposes? I have only participated in the making of sausage once, at a hog "slaughter" I suppose you'd call it. I work with some country folks, and one of them and a few of his friends all raise hogs and a few head of cattle and over the course of a few weekends in December/January, they slaughter all the hogs and break them down into meat for the year. It's an impressive event - several families, the men, women, and children together, all show up and everyone has a job. Some of the more experienced guys are cutting the big pieces like hams and ribs on a band saw, others of us were at big tables trimming skin, bones, cartilage, and fat off the smaller pieces and scraps, everything in its own bucket. Meanwhile, some of the girls are boiling the head and the other bones, and the head parts and other small scraps get swept up into corn meal for scrapple, the skin and fat are cooked on a giant burner so the fat renders out into lard, which of course gets used, and the skin turns into "cracklins" aka pork rinds. The bigger chunks of meat are mixed on a giant table and turned into sausage. All along, others are working to vacuum seal all the cuts and put them in a freezer. I left in the early afternoon, as some of the hams and bacon were headed for the smokehouse, a small wooden building about the size of a generous outhouse. The cold is taken care of because we're working in an un-climate-controlled garage in wintertime. I'll be damned if every single shred of each hog didn't get used for something. It was a great way to learn to respect the source of the meat I consume. Looks like a lot of work, Pio, but fun, and no doubt very rewarding.

It's mostly because that gives it the best texture. Keeping it cold keeps the fat from melting and smearing all over into the meat mixture. You can make the sausage without it being cold, but it wouldn't be as fine a texture, but more rustic. It's like making pie dough.

Some fat should be lost -- that's the purpose of the extra fat in most sausages. Otherwise the sausage tastes like boiled meat. I'm sure this is the case of what happened with yours, so don't take that as an affront.

The only sausage I make at home regularly is livermush because I can't buy it north of the Mason Dixon line. There's a few really good butchers around here that make great sausages (except for blood and livermush). Kielbasa, smoked bratwursts, Italian, etc.

Ah, I understand now. Makes sense. Thank you.

Outside of a few, it's not all it's cracked up to be. The old ethnic stuff is great, but the West Side Market is pretty crappy outside of a few vendors that now do most of their business through their own storefronts. There are too many imitators. It's nice to see Michael Symon not let his celebrity get to his head and keep his restaurants as they were pre-Iron Chef. I went to the Velvet Tango Room again a few weeks ago and it was so affected and crowded we just left. I'm talking most of the girls dressed up as vamps and the kitschy paintings purposely hung lopsided kind of contrivance.