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Local sausage

a couple laying on the terrace's chairs smiling at each other

Local sausage

In our quest to be as hyper-local as possible, I took a sausage-making class last week with the idea of making sausage from meat we purchase from local ranchers.  Our neighbor on one of the 40-acre parcels adjacent to Reverie raises his own beef cattle and he’s willing to sell one to us but he doesn’t do the slaughtering. Unfortunately there is a lack of slaughterhouses around here, although at least there is a shop in Placerville that will butcher whatever you bring into them, as long as it’s already dead (including deer that hunters bring in).

If I make my own sausage, not only can I use local producers, but I can control what goes into it and leave out the fillers and artificial ingredients (and mystery ingredients) that often find their way into sausage you buy in the store.

The class was held at the Sacramento Food Coop’s teaching kitchen, and was a hands-on class.  There was a little bit of information about the ratio of fat to meat (30/70), and where to buy ingredients such as natural casings, but mostly we just learned how to grind the meat and fat and stuff the sausage into the casings.

The instructor brought to the class with him a commercial meat grinder, which he said runs about $650, and a 20 lb. commercial sausage stuffer which retails for about $450.  So right off the bat the equipment costs $1100 if you want to do heavy-duty sausage making, although you can apparently get smaller sizes of sausage stuffers that cost less.

 

 

He said you can use an attachment on your Kitchen Aid (which I already have) that works okay for small batches, which is what I am going to experiment with first before investing in an expensive meat grinder.  I want to make sure I actually like making sausage and will spend the time to do it, rather than just buying it from small local producers, of which there are several.

We spent some time talking about the importance of keeping the ingredients very cold so that the meat and fat don’t “smear” when they pass through the grinder.

 

 

Then we learned how to pack the ground meat/fat into the sausage stuffer tube (throw it in like you are throwing a ball to avoid creating air pockets) and use the hand-cranked sausage stuffing machine to stuff the casings.

 

 

And then we each took turns tying off the sausages.

 

 

It was all pretty straightforward in the class – I think the hard part is getting quality ingredients, and having good equipment.

We got to take home  samples of each of the sausages we made:  bratwurst and a Tuscan-style salsiccia and I cooked them on the grill last night:

 

 

By the way, the best way to cook sausage is slowly over indirect heat – don’t slap them on the grill over high heat as they will burst and then shrink and dry out (you know what I mean, we’ve all done it!)

I will do an update when I get around to trying to make my own sausages.

 

Tamara

 

#reverieretreat

1 thought on “Local sausage”

  1. Margaret Robertson

    When I was a child, we grew everything we ate. We butchered a hog every winter and made hams, shoulders, sausage, etc. It was my job to turn the crank on the hand cranked sausage grinder. My mother made her own casings out of unbleached cotton muslin. She stuffed the casings by hand. Then we smoked them in the smokehouse where my dad kept a hickory fire going for what seemed like days and nights. All of our pork was smoked except my mother did something with the ears and the feet. She also made homemade soap out of the fat that was on the intestines. There was a black family that helped us and they always wanted the intestines to make ‘chitlins’. Whatever that is. I didn’t eat that. My mother sometimes made hogshead cheese, but I didn’t eat that either. My dad wanted the brains to cook for breakfast with scrambled eggs. UGH!! I didn’t eat that either!!!
    Life was hard ‘down on the farm’, but we had plenty to eat and a roof over our head with a warm bed to sleep in. Chickens laid eggs for us and sometimes we killed a rooster if we had too many and we would have fried chicken. If there was a hen that wasn’t laying eggs, my mother would make chicken and dumplings.
    We milked cows morning and evening and had milk to drink and churned some for butter. We had a cream separator that separated the cream from the milk and it was my job to turn the separator. We sold the cream to a creamery and they made ice cream, butter, and other products from the cream.
    Children these days don’t know how to survive. When we lived in West Africa for 11 years, it was not too difficult for me, I had grown up without electricity and all of the niceties of life. I knew how to survive.
    We also didn’t have a lot of ‘rules’ to go by like today. People are not allowed to drink raw milk these days and for sure one cannot butcher their meat and process it without permits of all kinds. I am glad you are learning a lot of things that are familiar to me. Keep up the good work. It is a good feeling to know that you can survive if things get too tough.
    Margaret

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