KitchenAid Sausage Stuffer

Making Sausages
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I recently invested in food grinder and sausage stuffing attachments for my KitchenAid mixer, then I ordered the books Home Sausage Making by Peery & Reavis and the Complete Sausage Book by Aidells & Kelly, lastly I found a source for casings to stuff the meat filling into.

Then I set about making sausages for the first time. After some trial and error, a few hours later I had sausages that actually looked and tasted like the real thing. I was ecstatic. These tender packages of savoury flavours, are some of my favourite food. And I’m not the only one who loves them.

Though made originally as a way to preserve meat, sausages are beloved worldwide, from Poland, Italy, and Germany to Asia, Portugal, and Greece. Sausage-making began about 5000 years ago in Egypt and China, and quickly spread to Europe. The Greeks and Romans made them. And Homer mentions them a number of tasty times in the Odyssey, for example, “A cook turns a sausage, big with blood and fat, over a scorching blaze, without a pause to broil it quick.”

There are now so many kinds of basic sausages and preserved meats the list is downright astonishing: Andouille, Bauerwurst, Boudin, Bangers, Bierwurst, Blood, Bockwurst, Bratwurst, Chorizo, Cotechino, Frankfurter, Italian, Kielbasa, Kishke, Loukanika, Liverwurst, Luganega, Weisswurst, Pepperoni, Thuringer, Salami, Smokies, Summer, and Breakfast, to name only a very few. Modern sausage chefs are making everything from Turkey, Feta, and Sundried Tomato sausages to Lamb, Rosemary, and Pine Nut.

The first recipe I tried from the Complete Sausage Book was the following:

Game Sausage with Rosemary and Mustard

3 lbs game shoulder, such as venison or elk
1 lb pork back fat
3 tbsp coarse-grain mustard
2 tbsp fruity olive oil
1 tbsp minced garlic
2 tsp kosher salt
2 tsp soy sauce
1 tsp chopped fresh rosemary or ½ tsp dried
Dijon mustard
Medium hog casings

Grind the meat and fat through a 3/8-inch plate. Combine in a large bowl with the coarse-grain mustard, oil, garlic, salt, soy sauce, and rosemary. Mix well with your hands, squeezing and kneading the mixture. Do not overmix, or the fat will begin to melt.

Stuff into medium hog casings. Leave as a coil.

Brush the sausage with Dijon mustard and bake it in a coil in a 350 F oven for about a ½ hour, until the internal temperature reaches 155 F.

As always, I can never follow a recipe exactly, so I decided to link the sausages, then poach them in water, followed by pan-frying. The end product turned out surprisingly like…flavourful sausages. The only problem was their dryness, which occurred because I’d substituted venison fat for the pork back fat recommended. Turns out venison and moose are dry meats, so the addition of pork or pork fat helps give a succulent quality to the finished product.

Venison fat doesn’t work very well in sausages for a couple of reasons. It’s hard, which leads to some serious gumming up of the grinder. And it doesn’t moisten the sausage satisfactorily.

My challenge now is to produce a tender venison sausage without the addition of pork fat. Many people I know either have an aversion to pork or an allergy to it, so I’m off and running in research and development.

One solution is to use beef fat. Another is to add brandy or wine to help moisten and tenderize. Another is to add moistening agents, such as fresh or dried apples, breadcrumbs, potatoes, or grains. I’ll likely go with a combination. The recipe possibilities are endless.

Which brings me to my grandest sausage scheme: I plan to develop a Venison Cabbage Roll Sausage, by combining the traditional tasty combination of rice, tomato, and cabbage, with venison. Um…unless someone has a recipe?

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Photo Credit: Daniel Andres Forero
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