make sausage

Last week, Jimbo and I made out second successful batch of sausage. This time we put pork through the meat grinder portion. Jimbo ground up a startling variety of dried peppers to add to the mix. It turns out what we’ve been told about adding spices is true: you have to add a lot to have much impact. Then we figured out how to set up and stuff the casings. It was hugely fun, something like the PlayDough Fun Factory of my youth. The resulting sausages were absolutely delicious! We’re getting good at this!

Our foray into sausage making was side-tracked by discovering the meat grinder purchased in April was missing parts, followed by multiple phone calls about replacing said parts, and finally returning the original purchase and getting another one. This portion of the tale took 6 months! (To top it all off, a “part” arrived in the mail last week for the returned grinder… and it was the wrong part!)

The story improves when we get to the actual sausage making. For our first sausage, we used half a turkey breast and about 2 pounds of chicken thighs. We added lots of pepper and some little dried red peppers, maybe pepperichinos? And, she says modestly, it’s pretty fantastic. We cooked some patties and ate them up immediately, and we’ve had sausage for breakfast every day this week! What a treat!