A Nice Little Saturday Planned...

We were lucky enough to enjoy a rainy and pretty cool (52 F / 11 C) Saturday in early June. How?

By making it awesome!

And what is more awesome than the local science museum and sausage?  Not at the same time mind you, but that's a good idea for next time. As Christina mentions below, we visited the Montshire Museum in Norwich, VT today. It was fun, they have live fish and bees and a space movie. What could be better?

Sausage.

Sausage could be better.

I have been mentioning to Christina that I want to make my own sausage for months.  In fact, we registered for the meat grinder and sausage-making attachments on the Kitchenaid for our wedding and one of our friends gave it to us!  (Thank you!).

So inspired/shamed by some very good store-bought chicken sausage (yes, "very good", "store-bought" and "chicken-sausage" all in the same sentence), and called out by my lovely wife, today was sausage making day.

First, we drove down to Claremont, NH and visited Liberal Beef, a butcher shop about a half hour away to get hog casings, pork shoulder and pork fat.  The rest of the ingredients we either had or picked up at the local Co-op in White River Junction.

I know I write more than Christina, so I'll just jump to the pictures and review in a minute:

The making part was a blast.  I also ran into three problems:

1. I think the fat wasn't cold enough the first time I put it into the grinder so it more "smooshed" through the holes as opposed to "ground" through.  That, or some of the tendon/sinew got stuck so I had to clean off the grinder before I could proceed.
2. Getting the hog casing onto the stuffer attachment.  I mean, this is salted pig intestine that I cleaned and rinsed and was still slimy and it was hard to hold it in the first place, never mind "sheathing the attachment" with it.
3. Not asking Christina to help.  So I did.  It got easier:

You are supposed to let the links sit and dry overnight in the fridge after you stuff them, but I am most certainly not patient.  We cooked a little (pre-stuffing) on a skillet and it tasted great.

A good amount of fennel, a little wine flavor, juicy, tasty, not too salty.  About an hour into it "drying" in the fridge we decided to grill up 3 links for a late dinner-ish snack.

Not that it was a letdown for my first sausage-making experiment, but it came out a little dry.  One of the sausage links split open on the grill and dried out. The other two were also a little dry, and I think I should add more pork fat.  I went a little light on that since the pork shoulder was already pretty fatty, but I think I should ramp up the fat to over 25%.

I'm also excited to see how they taste tomorrow morning after sitting overnight.  I read the flavors really meld this way, so tomorrow's sausage may trump the super-fresh links we had earlier.

We'll keep you posted.