I finally broke in the refurbished Enterprise sausage stuffer!(I outlined the restoration in in my first post. (Pardon the scattered pictures...although I figured out how to get more than one image in a post, they're tiny...and kinda all over the place. Click the picture for a bigger version).
Three adventurous friends and sausage-making virgins—one, a vegetarian, and all women of different ethnic heritage—showed up with family recipes to make. A Hungarian, a Filipino, a Norwegian, a Louisianian…sounds like the start of a bad joke, but the diversity made for some fine sausage.
I bought 60+? lbs. of pork shoulder and had the nice butcher bone-out, trim and grind the meat (a coarse “chili” grind), so I ended up with about 40 lbs. of ground pork. The butcher ground the meat and fat separately, which allowed me to “add” as much or as little fat to each recipe as desired. I now know, after cooking a few batches, that I didn’t add enough fat. The “experts” say you need a 1:3 ratio of fat to meat, but I was too distracted by the sickly smell of this bag full of ground pork fat nubbins to focus on the proper fat content.
The casings were another issue. The two hanks I bought had been in the freezer for a while, and appeared to be dried-out when I started soaking them. I was afraid they would tear or burst, and by the time everyone fiddled with the casings and made the requisite jokes about their prophylactic capabilities, they were in a tangled heap.
Fortunately, someone located casings at a local gourmet market. Not only did they sell us two pounds of casings at $4/lb (unbelievably cheap, and far more than we needed), the casings were pre-tubed!
For anyone who has ever spent time untangling and loading casing onto a stuffer tube, pre-tubed casings are a huge timesaver. Just insert the whole plastic sheath onto the tube, pull the ends of the plastic...
...and voila!
Our first batch was a Norwegian potato sausage recipe provided by my friend and fellow Southerner, C.B. We ground par-boiled potatoes and onions using my Kitchenaid grinding attachment and mixed it with the remaining ingredients (pork, beef, salt, white pepper, allspice).
We also mixed up batches of longaniza, a Filipino breakfast sausage, an Asian sausage from Aidell’s Complete Sausage Book (minus the shrimp), and the family recipe that I grew up making (a mixture of pork, cayenne and black pepper and red pepper flakes). Here, we test the mixtures for seasoning and tastiness. I should’ve noticed the lack of fat, but we were at least a few beers into the process, and my pork fat discerning capabilities weren’t 100 percent.
We also discovered, after several batches went through the press, that the plunger plate we were using was the “small” version—used for pressing fruit—not the larger plate needed for stuffing sausage. The larger plate allows less of a gap between the walls of the canister and the plate, so there’s not as much meat squishage. The stuffer didn’t come with the large plate (I’ve ordered one through Chop-Rite, the company that bought out Enterprise and owns the original designs, and sells replacement parts), but after some tinkering, Zsofi, the clever Hungarian, came up with the Dominick’s Bag Solution. We laid a few layers of clean bags over the top of the meat and “tucked” the sides down the inner wall of the canister. It wasn’t 100 percent effective, but it did prevent most of the squish.
The Norwegian potato sausages:
Our first spiral (I believe this one is the longaniza, a delicious, vinegar-y sausage) drew oohs and aahs.
The Coco Family Sausage in link form:
All in all, the sausage-making party was a smashing success. I made a huge batch of cheese grits, a big salad and pan-grilled batches of all four sausages for dinner. I don’t have a “favorite” from the group because all were so different (or familiar) and tasty in their own right.
I also made wontons with some of the leftover Asian sausage mix (there’s about 1 or 2 cups of the mix leftover in each batch b/c the stuffer doesn’t push out every last bit).
A Cantonese friend showed me how to make easy wontons for soup on a stopover in Lawrence, KS, during the book tour. They’re not as hard to make as you’d think, and the results are infinitely more delicious than the frozen. Now, if I could only master the art of soup dumplings….
It's hard to figure out a good end to a post like this, but I thought I might wrap this up with a list of things I'd do differently for the next sausage party.
1. Make fewer types of sausage. Although it was nice to have a 'heritage' sausage party, cleaning The Beast between batches proved to be exhausting, and my hands are still chapped. I might do two different recipes, but not four.
2. Wear hairnets or hats. (I won’t go into the details.)
3. Only make sausage on cold-cold days if you have a small, crappy refrigerator. Our refrigerator doesn’t have room for 40 lbs. of ground meat in various stages of sausage-making. But we kept everything outside--in a cooler or covered in stainless steel bowls--and it all stayed ice-cold.
4. Be brave. Mix in more pork fat nubbins.
5. ONLY EVER buy pre-tubed casings, no matter what the price.
6. Make friends with someone who knows how and has room to dry/age sausage.
7. Stock up on Zantac for the vegetarian who insists on eating sausage. (Seriously…she ate sausage. My kind of vegetarian.)
8. Don’t let the photographer drink too many Bloody Marys. We have 100 pictures of mixing the first batch of sausage, but zero of us at the end of the night actually eating the sausage.
9. Invest in a vaccu-sealer. Sucking the air out of 30 Ziploc bags stuffed with raw, encased meat isn’t fun.
10. Don’t eat homemade sausage at every meal for three days straight, no matter how delicious it is.
That's quite the sausage party. I didn't make quite as much at my last sausage party but I did have the pre-tubed casings from F&O. It's the was to go.
Cheers.
Posted by: mac | April 18, 2007 at 03:02 PM
I love the sounds of the Cochon de lait AND the sausage stuffing party... I would love to come and film you guys doing what you do best.
How can I get in touch?
Katie
Posted by: Katie M | July 31, 2008 at 06:42 AM