Have a go - Make some sausage

The healthy option

Many shop-bought sausages are three per cent salt (even the posh ones!) and some are even higher. It is not unusual for a sausage to need extra sugar simply to disguise its saltiness. They are frequently full of preservatives and colourants simply to make them look good on the supermarket shelves.

“Many shop bought sausages are so salty they need added sugar to disguise the taste.”

When you make your own sausages from fresh meat you decide on the ingredients! And you can freeze them – they don’t need to sit forever on a shelf, so they don’t need to be so high in salt. A healthy sausage has less than a third of the salt of a supermarket one.

What makes a good sausage?

Skin

This is clearly there to hold the sausage together, but it does more. The contents are under slight pressure inside the skin, and this helps the cooking. As the skin cooks it shrinks, improving the shape of the sausage and compressing the contents even further. The skin holds the flavour in the sausage, and so it should not be pricked. 

Fat

Fat melts during the cooking process, distributing heat evenly inside the sausage, cooking it from within. Low fat sausages are trickier to cook because the contents are very insulating and the outside cooks more quickly than the inside. Fat also tastes good!

Water

This is a vital ingredient in a sausage. It helps the mixture become pliable and thus will stuff more easily. Sausages are succulent, and much of this comes from the added water, which might be as much as ten per cent of the sausage weight. 

Do not disparage the water content of homemade sausages. It is not there for cheapness and without it the casings would be all but impossible to stuff. A sausage wouldn’t be a sausage without water.

Salt

This and other preserving chemicals are important if you want to keep sausages for more than a couple of days. Low salt sausages are undoubtedly healthier, and the change in flavour from high salt to low salt is so easy to get used to that you don’t notice it after a while. 

No salt sausages will last a maximum of three days in the refrigerator; ordinary salt ones will be good for twice this – but they can be frozen to make them last longer!

It is best not to make a sausage with a salt content higher than three per cent of the total weight.

Rusk or breadcrumbs

Rusk, breadcrumbs or cereal, is an important part of a sausage. They bind the ingredients, soak up cooking juices and help improve the consistency. They add nothing to the flavour of the sausage, but by soaking up fat, the overall flavour is enhanced.

Finding the end of your skin

To make your own sausage you will need:

1 kilo of Pork Shoulder

200 g sausage making rusk, or breadcrumbs if you prefer

200 ml water

2 level tsp salt (This is 10 g salt, so these sausages are less than 1% salt - Healthy Sausages!)

½ tsp pepper

1 mixing bowl

1 grinder or food processor

1 sausage stuffer (or you might have a grinder with sausage stuffing attachment)

1.25 m sausage casing, hog casings are easiest to use for first-timers

1 tray to collect the filling sausage

1 knife to cut the links

The easiest way to buy sausage casings is to go to your butchers and tell him you want to make your own sausages. Buy the pork from him - he will even mince it for you, and sell you the skins too. Some butchers will even let you watch them making sausages, and there is no better way of learning how to make three-way links than watching the experts do it.

Open your packet of skins (never mind the smell) and place them in a bowl of clean water. Replace the water several times until the smell goes away. 

Now rinse the skins under running water, both inside and out.

Chop your meat into centimetre cubes and then grind or mince them. If you have to use a food processor, pulse the machine to avoid it becoming like soup.

Add your other ingredients to this mix, depending on the size of your food processor. 

It is important that you mix everything as thoroughly as you can. I tend to mix the dry ingredients together first, then mix this with the meat products. Another way of mixing is to add the smallest quantities to the water first and then use this to mix the stuffing.

Once you have created your sausage mix and are ready to stuff your casing, you can fry a small amount to check that you are happy with the seasoning.

Find the end of your casing

If you don’t fall about laughing you are better than me! Usually the casings are attached to a piece of string, which means when you lift it out of the water the casings attached to it fall under gravity like an alien. Moisten the delivery tube or nozzle of your stuffer and carefully push the casing on. 

Starting to stuff the casings can be a daunting task, but is actually quite simple. You will benefit from an extra pair of hands, one to crank the machine (or start it working if it is electrical or push your meat down the funnel) and another to manage the flow of sausage from the other end.

Ready to stuff

You can control the thickness of the sausage by gently holding back the casing as it fills with mixture; this will allow more meat per centimetre of sausage, and consequently you get a thicker sausage.

Don’t worry about breakages in the skin. It is bound to happen sometime, concentrate on maintaining a rhythm and an evenly filled sausage. For your first try, just let the meat take the casing without restriction. You don’t need to over fill the casings; leave room for twisting your links.

Link your sausages by simply twisting into individuals and snip through the link.

Leave overnight to mature.

Cook slowly – without pricking!