I haven’t done any interesting cooking with the monsters for a while, so I decided they might enjoy having a go at some breakfast sausages. I’ve had mixed success in the past with sausages. Despite having all the right butchery equipment I’ve never quite got the consistency or taste quite right. So never one to shirk a challenge I doubled down by including the monsters in the process.
Sausage Research
At first glance making sausages is quite simple and fundamentally this is true. But there are a few pitfalls and elements of technique that separate success and failure. My main failures have revolved around the consistency of the final sausage. Reading up on this at places like sausgemaking.org an easy beginners mistake is not to get the meat and equipment col enough before mincing and stuffing. The problem is that warm meat allows the fat to smear through the protein which makes the final product feel grainy.
So this time around I have read up on technique prepared my equipment and ingredients and followed or at least only mildly altered an accepted recipe.
I chose the following recipe:
- 1000g pork shoulder and back fat
- 100g fresh bread crumbs
- 100ml of water
- 25g of seasoning
The seasoning was 2.5% by weight made up in the following proportions:
- 8 parts salt
- 2 parts ground white pepper
- 1 part ground dried rosemary
- 1 part ground mace
Making the sausages – mincing the meat
As you can see in the photo above I started using a hand mincer which I had bought some time before but never tried. For one reason or another this was a disaster, the fat and connective tissues got caught in the plate blocking the mincer. I don’t know why but the blade wasn’t cutting this away with each rotation. I had only chosen the hand mincer over my electric mincer as I thought A-Bomb and the Terminator would enjoy it more.
So for my second attempt I used an electric mincer that whilst noisy generally gets the job done. I washed all the equipment, dried it then placed it in the fridge to chill down. Once I was ready to start I set up the mincer with the coarse plate. The girls and I then proceeded to pass the meat through for it’s first pass after an appropriate safety briefing about not wanting little fingers in my sausages. I returned the minced pork to the fridge to chill and prepared the other ingredients.
Making the mix
I created a pot of seasoning based on my ratio using half a teaspoon per part. As luck would have it this gave me just a little more than the 25g I need for my sausages. I used fresh breadcrumbs in my recipe simply because I didn’t have stale to bread to hand. And reduced my water in line with the advice in this guide found at this website where I had previously got advice on bacon making. For my measurements I was happy to using my standard baking scales for the breadcrumbs and meat but used specialist set of more accurate scales for the seasoning.
After the meat has re-chilled in the fridge I add the water, breadcrumbs and seasonings as per the recipe.
I next place the whole lot in the stand mixer and used the mixer to turn the mix over for a few minutes. Firstly this is to evenly distribute the other ingredients through the meat to give a consistent product. I have also read that the texture is improved if the meat is worked a little before being stuffed.
I then put the mixed ingredients back through the mincer on the medium plate.
The final mix had a pleasant consistency. I hadn’t over minced it to a puree the fat and meat seemed evenly dispersed along with the dry ingredients. I did take a small amount of the final sausage meat at this stage and fry some off to check the taste. It was good the consistency was what I was after and the taste was firmly in the breakfast sausage bracket.
Stuffing the Sausages
Now this is a Cooking with Monsters and I have to admit some stages were monster-lite. They enjoyed feeding the mincer with chunks of meat and weighing the ingredients but the mixing and second mincing lacked interest for them. So I resorted a little hard sell to get them involved in the stuffing.
I used a piston type stuffer, where the cylindrical body is packed with the meat then a geared drive pushed a piston down the cylinder driving the sausage meat out. In the past I have used to use the electric mincer for this but generally I found it noisy and difficult. For these sausages I had managed to source some artificial skins from a local butcher merchant and despite have a very plastic like feel were relatively easy to add to the nozzle.
I had the first go at making the sausages and after getting the hang of the skins was quite happy with the result. Although truth be told I did over stuff them a little. The girls had a go and thought this was great fun. Wildly swinging between overstuffing and under stuffing the skins. But nothing I wasn’t able to correct. The skins allowed for about 40cm of sausage per nozzle and I probably got 80cm of sausage . I did come unstuck in one regard. Ideally I would like to have made links. However being unfamiliar with the skins I over stuffed them and after a few abortive attempts gave up on links. The final stage before cooking was to return them to the fridge to allow the seasoning and flavours to develop.
The Final Product
Because I couldn’t link them I decided to cook them like a cumberland or boerwurst in a spiral. I also cooked them all at once because I had concerns over hygiene, having included the kids in the process I wasn’t as confident over the process as I might have been so I erred on the safe side.
They tasted really good. A proper breakfast sausage taste if I do say so. If I were being super critical they probably were a little heacy on the mace but not so much that it detracted from the enjoyment. The texture was good and the skins brown nicely. All in all I think it was successful activity with the monsters.