EATING SAUSAGE

Yesterday I gave you a blow by blow account of making sausage.  Today, we ate sausage.  For brunch we had scrambled eggs, coffee cake, and sausage patties.  Marty fried the sausages, keeping the three kinds carefully in order.  Then he cut each patty in half and we taste tested them.  As always pictures below.

 The three types of sausage are ready to be fried.  Marty has the name of each above the patty.  He put them in the pan in that order. Left  Polish Kielbasa, middle  fennel sausage, and right Sicilian Linguisa.

 Starting to fry.  Really, Really smells good.

 Flipping the patties.  Notice how little grease is in the skillet.  Marty had to add some.  We had worried they would be really greasy. When he ground the meat it had a lot of white (fat) showing.  

 They are ready to be taken up.   You may have noticed all the foil around the burners.  We hate cleaning the splatters of grease on the top of the stove and on the burners.  So we cover as much as we can with foil for ease of clean up.

Ready for the taste test. Marty plated the halves in the same order he had them in the skillet.   The sausages were really good. 

The seasonings were not as strong as the aroma.  We had worried there might be garlic over kill.  We did think there was too much salt.  We don't use a lot of salt, so it was too much for our taste.  Maybe not too much for salt users.  We put a bite of egg with each bite of sausage and that toned down the salt.  The seasonings were pre- packaged and we had used more meat than the seasonings called for.  So heaven help you if you used the correct amount of meat, I think it would have been inedible.

Now that we have made sausage several times, we are pretty sure of our abilities.  Next time we will make up our own seasonings and control the salt.  More fat and less salt next time.

MAKING SAUSAGE

My refrigerator smells wonderful.  In fact my whole kitchen smells great.  We make sausage today.  Well, mainly Marty did most of the work.  I helped some.  We bought a pork butt and some casings.  Then Marty washed the casings, chopped the meat into cubes, poured magic herbs and spices on the meat, and let it marinate for almost a day.  Then he started making the meat into sausage.

                       Before grinding the meat, Marty added white wine to it.

                            Marty is adding the meat to the meat grinder. 

                           And another handful of pork cubes are added.

 At this point after the meat is ground you get the casings out.  They are pushed onto the stuffing tube.  One person adds the meat (Marty adds, he has stopped to take a picture of his helper.) and the other one contols the meat going into the casing.  You have to push the casing off the spout which is to the left of my hands.  You can't do it too fast or there will be air pockets in the sausage.  If you are too slow, the casing will have a blow out. I did good.  No air pockets and no blowouts.

 At a certain point, no more sausage will come out of the spout.  But there is still meat in there.  Marty is cleaning out the meat in there.  We made patties of the meat he cleaned out.  So we have sausage in casings and patty sausage.

 This is Sicilian Fennel sausage.

 Here we have Portuguese Linguisa.

And this is Polish Kielbasa.

Tomorrow we probably will have the patty sausage for breakfast. In the bottom two pictures you can see the patties in deli paper.  The link sausage will be for later this week.