To celebrate National Sausage week we found this basic recipe from our Meat Manual which anyone can do. Follow these steps and you can quickly make the perfect, tasty all-rounder sausage that you can enjoy for breakfast, lunch or dinner. It’s a good one to practise if you’re new to sausage making, and then build on as you become more experienced.
INGREDIENTS
• Approx. 1kg minced pork (a combination of fattier and leaner cuts)
• 1 tablespoon of fresh sage, finely chopped
• 100g breadcrumbs or rusk
• 150ml ice cold water
• 10g salt
• 5g black pepper
• 5g nutmeg
• Approx. 1.5m of hog casing
Step 01
Keep everything as cold as possible. Dice the meat into cubes, place them in a large bowl, and put that and the grinder attachments in the freezer for 30 minutes to chill right down.
The colder the meat is, the firmer it’ll be, meaning it will ‘cut’ better when it hits the plate. If it’s warm and flaccid it’ll just smear and stretch rather than cut. Keeping everything cold helps with hygiene too.
Step 02
Most grinders come with two plates: coarse and fine (some have three). For sausages, I like to grind on the coarse plate. Prepare your grinder and bowl (the one that’s been in the freezer so it, too, is cold). Refresh the hog casings in water for 10 minutes.
Step 03
Start the machine. Feed in the meat pieces and allow the ground meat to fall into the bowl. Needless to say, be careful of long hair, loose clothing and your fingers.
When all the meat is ground, mix in your herbs and spices and combine and then add the breadcrumbs and any water if you think it needs it (or experiment with other liquids) and recombine.
The mixture should now be firmer. For smoother-textured sausages put the ground meat mixture through the grinder again with the coarse plate, then place in the fridge.
Step 04
Remove the plate and fi t the tubular sausage attachment to the grinder (my model includes a separator ring). Slide the hog skin on to the attachment so it’s all bunched up at the far end. This is, perhaps, a task best performed out of sight of those with a delicate disposition.
Step 05
Place a tray or plate under the grinder to catch your sausages. Feed the ground meat mixture slowly into the grinder with one hand, while holding the resulting sausage with the other, allowing it to fall down onto the plate. Don’t worry too much about air pockets, you can snip them out later.
You can just coil up your sausage, Cumberland or boerewors style, or twist every 10cm and snip into individual sausages. Butchers only make them in long chains so they’re easier to hang and move about.
If you want to do that, pinch and twist as before, but loop every third sausage through the other previous two.