Those of you that have been following our Instagram or Facebook posts will have seen that we purchased half a steer off a lovely local lady we know. The butcher did an amazing job and everything was prepped and packaged into meal portions for us ready to go into the freezer. We, however, wanted to process the mince and sausages ourselves. So on Saturday hubby ground and packaged 13kgs of mince while I finished my last university assignment for the year. He had done some research on sausage making, found a few recipes to try and went to the local butcher to get some pork and sausage casings. We didn’t have any rusk so hubby found a recipe and made some ready for a sausage making day on Sunday.
We settled on:
Beef and Sausage seasoning
Luckily hubby thought ahead on the Saturday and broke the bags of beef into the amounts that we needed for each batch of sausages as well as cutting them for our trusty little mincer. We started at about 10am by mincing all of the meat.
Once each batch was minced we mixed in the additional herbs and spices, rusk mixed with water and any other ingredients the recipes called for and thoroughly mixed it through by hand until we had a nice sticky consistency. We then put these into the chest freezer to keep them nice and cool between batches.
We did run into a few issues. Our mincer was clogged with stringy pork fat twice. The first time broke the motor adjusting brush. Luckily it came with a spare so we had a pause and replaced it. It then happened again, cracking the new piece and we thought we were going to have to stop (this all happened on our last mincing batch). We took it slow and gentle and luckily the cracked piece held out for the rest of the day.
Then it was time to stuff the casings. The last time we made sausages we were able to source some natural casings, however this time we weren’t organised so we could only get the artificial ones. Due to this we couldn’t fit as much casing on the pipe as we previously did which made the process that bit longer. I also found the artificial casings to split more than the natural ones we had previously used. The first few casings we used were soaked in the water for longer and split less as well, so maybe they just needed to soak for that little bit more???
It took as a while to get in a groove but we eventually were able to get the fullness, thickness and speed pretty consistent. Hubby fed the meat into our mincer and linked the sausages once they were full and I fed the casings onto the machine and I stuffed the casings. The first two batches were a bit too full and we left it too long between stuffing and linking them which caused them to burst once we applied any kind of pressure. The last two batches we were able to get reasonable links of sausages with little to no splits. I didn’t think to get pics of hubby linking the sausages and I couldn’t stuff and photograph at the same time so there aren’t any pictures of that either.
In the end we finished up at roughly 5pm with 5 big batches of sausages (we think it worked out to be around the 20kg mark by the time we added the pork sausages as well) ready to bloom in the fridge. Although now our fridge and freezers (really the whole house too) smells like sausages. Hopefully this labor of love has been worth it. The last thing left to process is some of the bones into bone broth, but for now they’re in the freezer and can wait for a while.