homemade sausages (merged)

marmitepotato

Thanks Badrick, will look now.

zippychick

our homemade sausages thread is packed with ideas!

ill merge this later on

Zip

[Deleted User]

I use a kmix sausage maker. Good fun, tip is to lightly oil hands when guiding the sausage out. I use half lean pork shoulder and half belly pork and spices from good ebay sellers. I use rusk as it makes the sausages moist with a good texture.

PeteW

I'm doing my mincing and stuffing by hand using a standard steel mincer, and am having problems with my meat turning to mush. The main problem seems to be stringy bits of fat getting wrapped around the cutting blade - any way to avoid this? I've tried putting the meat in the freezer for a bit, but it didn't seem to make that much difference.

Cottage_Economy

Does anyone make their own sausages? Hubby bought me a sausage maker for Christmas and I have used it a couple of times but am not happy with the results.

The finished sausages are quite solid and tough instead of nice and juicy, and I'm not sure why.

The last batch I used 500g pork mince (around 20% fat), a slice of bread blitzed to make breadcrumbs and various seasonings plus a bit of water.

What am I doing wrong? Do I need more breadcrumbs and water? Or a fattier mixture?

I haven't yet tried any wet additions to the sausages, like apple or leek, as I wanted to get the basic sausage recipe perfected first.

Meadows

I would have thought that the sausage maker came with recipes/quantities?


I did them years ago but decided they were too messy have a look at this site to see if it helps: http://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/how_to_make_homemade_sausage/

Cottage_Economy

Meadows wrote: »

I would have thought that the sausage maker came with recipes/quantities?


I did them years ago but decided they were too messy have a look at this site to see if it helps: http://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/how_to_make_homemade_sausage/

Thanks Meadow. No, there was no recipe book with it. I found a recipe on the net for a basic Cumberland which I tried, which was lovely and peppery, but the sausage once cooked was quite hard and tough.

I thought maybe I could be over-filling the casings?

Or maybe ready prepared mince is ground too finely?

Meadows

Not sure I would have thought the meat needed to be quite fine?

According to the site below ↓ ratio of binder to primary meat is 15 to 20%. Most sausage recipes will call for two or more types of meat. The primary meat type is the one we most associate with a sausage style. The second meat is used for flavour and as a binder. The binder is ground very fine, almost into a sticky paste. It holds, or binds, the sausage together. 10 to 15% fat as binder is a good place to start. The primary meat in a recipe should be coarse ground in order to provide meatiness and firm texture to the sausage.
http://www.leeners.com/meat/how-to/sausage-making-tips.shtml

Pink.

This thread has lots of tips and advice which may help:


homemade sausages (merged)


I'll add this thread to that one later.

flea72

You need to grind the meat a bit more, so its smoother and add more fat and not breadcrumbs.

My standard pork sausage is about 1lb pork, 1/2lb fat. Usually buy pork shoulder that i mince myself, as that contains the meat and layer of fat. you just need to remove the skin (or get butcher to do it). Then just add seasoning/herbs.

Although i will say a good quality sausage, will be quite firm in texture, compared to sausages you can buy in the supermarket