The Joy Of Sausages

It's hard to believe that we've never in 12 years of smallholding made our own sausages. You need a certain amount of equipment for mincing, mixing and stuffing. This can get very expensive for industrial scale equipment, or you can go to the other end of the scale and sausage-making will be a nightmare if you're making more than half a dozen.

Then there's all the bother with mixing in rusk and choosing the correct skins. And that's before the somewhat suggestive but risky procedure of getting the stuffing into the skins. Anybody remember The Generation Game..!

We've not kept pigs for quite a few years now. They cost a lot to feed and you get a lot (and I mean a lot) of meat.

But for a while we'd been wondering about turning some of the older sheep into sausages and burgers. Shetland sheep are a native breed and are best kept through one winter to go for meat in their second year. This is known as hogget and has a stronger taste than commercial lamb. It is much sought after.

Sending off intact males can be problematic with some species. Goats  and pigs especially can come back with a strong taint to the meat which personally I don't find very palatable. But we've  never had a problem with intact Shetland rams. We keep them away from the females before their final journey and try to make sure they go in late summer, when they have had the opportunity to fatten up on the pasture and before their hormones get going in the autumn.

Rambutan had to go off as he was related to too many of the ewes. And three of the older ewes need to go off soon. Rambutan is about four. The older ewes about nine, so they will definitely be classified as mutton, a rarely sold meat these days as it's not economical to keep livestock that long.

So Rambutan went with a younger castrated ram and we got both of them minced with lamb and mint burgers and merguez sausages in mind. In the end there really was no discernible difference between the mince we got back from the two sheep.

Kill weight for Rambutan was 25.0kg and for the other 17.5kg which is about right for a native breed sheep. Commercials are bigger, but natives are tastier and have longer lives.

We got nearly 17kg of mince from Rambutan and over 12kg from the other, giving us plenty of mince to play with. We weren't sure about the fat content of the mince. Most recipes call for minced shoulder and belly. I reckoned that the whole sheep minced would come back about right and it certainly looked about right.

I did a fair bit of research into recipes for lamb sausages and lamb burgers, tallied up the ingredients we needed and made a visit to the ethnic stores of Peterborough to stock up on spices. Some of the mince we kept back for other recipes.

Day 1 - Mixing the ingredients

We spent an evening mixing up ELEVEN different flavours!

These were: 

BURGERS: Greek, Middle-eastern, Spicy Indian, Thai, Minted and Basic with rosemary and thyme. We mixed up each batch by hand, working the spices and other ingredients in thoroughly, then put them in the fridge overnight for the flavours to blend and the meat to chill.

These were the SAUSAGES: Minted, Lamb Massala, Rosemary & Red Wine, Merguez 1 and Merguez 2.

Day 2 - Burgers and Meatballs

We have a burger press so it didn't take too long to make about 120 burgers. A quick try of a couple of the mixes and we were absolutely delighted with the juiciness and the flavours. We used some of the various mixtures to make meatballs too.

Day 2 - Sausage Making Attempt 1

There is a mysterious aura surrounding the dark art of sausage making. Secret recipes, do it like this, don't do that... It was an art we had thus far never dabbled in.

A while back we had purchased a grinder and sausage stuffer attachment to go on our stand mixer. Even if the sausage making went badly, the mincer is a happy medium between something hefty and commercial and something clamped to the side of the kitchen worktop and cranked by hand. We ordered some sheep casings for the sausages. I had ordered two sizes as I really wasn't sure what we actually needed, what would fit the three sizes of sausage stuffer tube we had and what would work best. The casings come in brine and need rinsing and soaking. They are a bit slippery to handle so we paid a tiny bit extra to get the ones which come on a spool. This makes it easier to load them onto the stuffing tube.

We started with the Rosemary and Red Wine mixture. It went incredibly well. To our amazement the sausages came out almost perfectly. But it turns out this was beginner's luck! When we switched to a smaller diameter skin and tube things started to go wrong. The meat mix was backing up and just wouldn't go into the skins. We tried all sorts with no luck. We even went back to  the wider skins and tube but our problems continued. A brilliant start had somehow come to a stuttering and very frustrating halt.

Day 3 - The Joy Of Sausage making

We figured that our problem had been when the meat mixture warmed up. So we kept it nice and cold and put the metal grinder parts into the freezer for 10 minutes before each batch. Hey presto! Back to successful and easy sausages. 

We tried switching back to the thinner tube. It was better than the previous evening, but still not easy so we settled on the 24/26mm casings.

It really didn't take long to finish making the last three batches of sausages. When I say sausages, I mean 2m long sausages! We still had to figure how to twist and tied them into strings.

This is where YouTube really came into itself. Scott Rea Productions is a fantastic channel. We had used it to solve our initial sausage problems and the slo-mo sausage stringing video was perfect. It wasn't quite as easy as he made it look and we adapted the method a little, but it wasn't long before we were both enjoying great success... to our surprise.

This certainly won't be the last of our sausage-making and I am very happy using sheep instead of pork as the basis for sausages and burgers. In the end we didn't use the rusk we had bought in. It really wasn't necessary.

So, my five pieces of advice:

Sausages don't have to be pork (in fact lamb makes excellent meatballs and burgers too)

Do a bit of research and get everything ready

Give yourself time

It helps to have two people

KEEP EVERYTHING REALLY COLD