I had a dream. A dream to try and make homemade sausage. Sausage a’la Moby. Yes, our own taste, our own recipies. Hand ground and flavored with care and careful consideration.

And then I saw it. On Ebay. A cast iron, old fashioned, brand new, hand crank tabletop meat grinder. And it was $11.

So it came home to live at the Moby. And today, we made sausage!!!

First thing… you get some meat. And some education. Apparently some of the best pork for sausage is what they call the shoulder butt, or a Boston Butt pork roast. It’s not really the hind end of the beast, it’s the upper shoulder area before the arm hams and roasts and such like that. And guess what? It’s really not very expensive! I’ve heard it called a 7 bone roast too, I believe because there is a blade bone that looks like the number 7 in it. Beef have the same 7 bone roast, too.

I got two big butt roasts for only $1.69 a pound. Almost 7 pounds of meat.

Found out the hard way that if you cut the meat up in chunks that are a little too big, it’s harder to crank and slows you down. Of course, you don’t have to make it into 1/4 inch cubes or anything, but the smaller the chunk, the faster you’ll be making sausage.

You include all the fat! Yes, you do. If you don’t include at least 10% fat, your sausage will be, well, kind of dry and crumbly and well, not sausage. 30% is good! I’m not sure where we fell, but it turned out fine, so I suspect we were right in the money. All the recipes I looked at seemed to imply that the butt roast was a nature’s perfect mix of meat and fat, so I went with that. SImpler, the better.

Don’t include the silver or tendons, sometimes called gristle? You’ll see it.. a silvery sort of thin membrane. Our roasts didn’t have much and it was easy to just sliver slice it away. And of course, don’t include the bone. Save those for roasting and throwing in a stock pot with some veggies for stock perhaps? Or a dog you know might love you even more for a bit of a chew on one.

Jessy set off at peeling a couple apples and mushing up some fresh garlic. We had in our mind to make three kinds of sausage. A maple sugar breakfast patty, an apple and honey link and a savory bulk onion and garlic sausage.

Maggie cleaned and assembled the machine, because she loves machines. Of course, she spend most of the time trying to figure out how to make a motor attachment and all that for it. She is my little inventor – machine geek!

It was pretty cool to see the first batch get ready to go… we started with the apple honey links. We like a sweeter sausage over a spicy sausage, so that was our plan.

First thing, first… you grind the meat. We started out with the finer plate that grates the meat after it is ground and sliced and that was kind of a mistake. We switched half way through to the larger plate and that was MUCH easier. It was still perfectly ground and all chewed up by the internal auger. I think the finer plate would be good for chicken or perhaps veal or something like that.

Everything we read about said that you need to keep your work area clean and tidy, which we did. And to wash hands often, avoid contacting other surfaces and such, your nose, etc. Expect to get a little icky. We wanted to wash off frequently. Hands were really the easiest way to load the grinder and things like that. I think I might order the little hopper attachment for the grinder, because the opening is a little small. It would be a bit easier to be able to load up the hopper and then speed grind away. We used two people, one to grind, one to load. It was still fun.

Not like “I want to do this every day fun”, but you know, fun to give it a try.

Okay, now comes the recipe part. Oh, by the way… grinding meat produces heat and you want to keep your ground meat chilling. So grind some, pop in a bowl and put in the frig… grind some more, add to the bowl, etc. Just a word of advice. Nothing scary, just good for the meat and all. Seems to grind a little better colder anyway. You want to keep your sausage making as clean and sanitary as possible because nothing ruins a good day of sausage making like food poisoning the next day!

We looked at recipes online and such, and found this basic plan.

For every pound of meat you want:

1/2 tablespoon of coarse salt
and 2-3 tablespoons of various spice

That’s how we started.

For our apple sausage we used 2 pounds of pork, 2 small chopped apples, 1 tablespoon of honey, 1/2 teaspoon of dried garlic, 1 tablespoon of coarse salt and 1/2 teaspoon of oregano.

Mixed it up good and then fed it through the grinder again, only we added the link tube.

Now, we didn’t use a casing because I noticed that a lot of people didn’t use the casings, they just made link and fried them up like a tube burger. I want to try links at some point, but I figgered that I would try links, patties and bulk and didn’t really want to buy a huge box of casings and all that stuff too. One step at a time.

It was really easy to make them skinless. I just got a cookie pan and laid a piece of wax paper in there and away we went. Maggie is the best sausage cranker in the house, and in fact, she cranked almost all of it! Strong girl!

We used our postage scale under the bowl to measure out the meats. Once we added the apple, it was about 2 and a half pounds. We made about 24 links from that. Kind of long, longer than a store link I think. I used my hand to catch it as it came out and would measure a hand span for a link. Like they measure the height of horses. I would just tear it off with my pinky and lay carefully on the pan. Into the freezer for an hour or so and they flash froze nicely and we could lay them in a bag or a container easily. You can then just get out a couple or a whole family load as you need them.

Next up was a maple sugar flavored breakfast patty. We have a little slider press and we cut up wax paper squares to make the process easier. Just tube out a little bit into a little swirl and then put it in the press between two piece of wax paper. Press, remove and freeze. Pretty easy.

The last grind was a savory onion and fresh garlic mix. We just took off the tube and grind straight out. Made 1/2 pound portions and bagged them up.

We took a couple of each type out and grilled it up for dinner. Pretty darn cool…

Jessy made us some cheesy scalloped potatoes and carrots and she grilled up the sasusage. We were ready to feast!

It was fantastic good… but we noticed right away that our spice mixes were pretty bland. Well, perhaps not bland, they tasted good, but just not enough of the spices. I think we’re so used to very highly spiced sausage and our mix was a little light. But tasty, hard to explain. I think the next time we make sausage, which won’t be long, we will double the spices. Not the additives, like the onion or apple, just the spices. In hind sight, as we had doubled the poundage of meat, we were a bit short on reaching the higher end of 3 tablespoons of spice TIMES 2, we were more like at the low end. And I think we need to add a bit of sage. Hence the name, sau-sage…. it’s like you expect it. We didn’t add it to any of our mixes. I think it would be good in them all. And I was thinking a hint of cinnamon and even a bit of brown sugar to the apple links would really be a good taste sensation.

All in all… it was really cool and now we have a bunch of sausage for the freezer! And at $1.69 a pound… and just a few extra ingrediants and spices, it was much cheaper than the fancy handmade sausages at the meat store ($6.99 a pound) and we can make it to our own likes!

Tomorrow we are grinding our own hamburger and we’re going to try two different tastes… one a cheeseburger and bacon grind, the other a BBQ onion and garlic grind. Stay tuned!!!

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