Our family eats a lot of sausage.  Sausage links, patties, with eggs as breakfast tacos, in spaghetti, in lasagna, and fettuccine alfredo are some of our favorite ways to eat sausage.  My husband, Lane, makes sausage with our neighbor, who is a very experienced sausage-maker.  Lane use a 60/40 mixture of farm-raised pork and wild venison.  He makes both link and pan sausage.  The latter is the easiest to make because it requires no stuffing into casings.  It is also my personal favorite.

Measuring out the pan sausage for packaging.

Either way he seasons the meat the same way.  After you bone out the meat and chop it into cubes, then you grind it up with an electric or hand-cranked grinder.  You take about 7 pounds of pork and 5 pounds of venison.  Lane works with 12 pounds of meat at a time to ensure proper seasoning.

Sausage makers tend to be very secretive about their seasonings.  I am not allowed to divulge the amounts that my neighbor uses.  However, I can tell you that he uses black pepper, crushed red pepper, sage, and salt.  With your hand, mix the seasoning with the meat until it looks evenly distributed.

For pan sausage, measure out the portions you want to make, wrap in freezer paper, and label with the date.  I use the pan sausage in my Italian foods for extra flavor.  It is much more flavorful than ground beef.  It also makes great breakfast patties.

For link sausage, Lane uses natural pork casings.  They come frozen, so he thaws them out in a bowl of water.  When they are thawed, he places one on the nozzle of the sausage stuffer.  With one hand, Lane pinches about an inch of the casing.  As the casing is being filled with sausage, coil the sausage on the table until the intestine is filled.

Lane is wrapping the sausage in freezer paper.

Since Lane and our neighbor do not tie knots in the casings, they cut the sausage about every two feet to make a link similar to the size that you buy in the grocery store.  They squeeze about 1″ of meat from the ends of the link, and they add the excess meat back into the main bowl.  This process continues until all of your meat has been stuffed into casings and made into links.

You do not have to smoke the links, but it takes a longer time to cook the sausage.  Our neighbor has a building for smoking meats.  Our neighbor and Lane hang the links on broom sticks in the building.  Outside they light a fire in an Old Smokey barbecue pit.  When the flames die down, Lane throws some pecan wood on the fire.  You can use any wood you desire for flavoring.  Carefully they carry the smoking pit into the little building.  They allow the sausage to sit in the smoke for about six hours.

When the time has expired, the sausage is firm and the casings have a nice dark color.  The meat no longer looks raw.  Then you just wrap, label, and freeze.  Heat the sausage link on a grill or in a pan with some water.

Homemade sausage is rewarding to make.  It is also a great way to use the more undesirable cuts of meat from your hog or deer.  Lane makes about 100 pounds of sausage a year.  Even then we still have months of the year without any sausage to eat.  It just makes you more happy when sausage-time comes around again.

Tags: casings, link sausage, pan sausage, pork and venison, sausage making, spices

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 at 7:26 am and is filed under Homesteading. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.