sausage making (so many jokes...)

(commercial sausage-stuffer & assembly line)

am i totally juvenile for wanting to make a bunch of jokes during the brooklyn kitchen's "sausage making 101" class on tuesday? yea, i am... but i don't think i was alone... with grilling season upon us, i thought the class would be informative and perhaps inspire some grill-master buddies of mine to make their own sausages (insert joke here) so let's hope i get to post up some pictures during the summer with some sausage making adventures (jokes! i've got jokes!)...

tips i picked up during the very hands on and interactive class led by brent young of the awesome marlow & daughters in williamsburg...

• you want to achieve about a 70:30 ratio of meat to fat, pork shoulder is the best cut to use
  
• the happier the pig (in this class we used berkshire), the better the sausage
• chill the cubed pork prior to grinding - this helps achieve the proper consistency
• domestic appliance attachments (kitchenaid, cuisinart) can yield a decent result when grinding the pork down (of course commercial works better)
• beef casings are larger therefore easier to handle vs. lamb casings which are smaller
• not much liquid need to combine the ingredients (working the mixture by hand will create a pretty sticky mixture)
• yes, it is possible to undermix
• yes, it is possible to overmix
• you can pretty much use any sort of liquid the recipe calls for - beer, water, apple juice, beer... 
• to check for seasonings, be sure to fry test a patty before stuffing
• when grilling sausages, you want to cook 'em slow. indirect heat for at least 20 minutes keeps the sausages from drying out and will create a nice caramelization

we split up into two teams to work on 2 different sausage recipes - the breakfast sausage and chorizo. my team worked on the breakfast sausage and combined 5lbs of cubed pork shoulder, 45g salt, 7g black pepper, 8g cayenne, 6g mace, 25g dried sage, fresh sage. at this stage it would have been ideal to let these good things marinate overnight but alas we did not and went ahead with putting it through a cuisinart fitted with the coarse grinder attachment. once grounded, we added 250g cold water and a healthy "glug" of syrup and proceeded to work the mixture until it passed the "stick to the hand" patty test. 

oh - what's that you ask? just make a small patty (size of your palm) and hold it upside down... if the patty falls from your palm immediately, the mixture hasn't reached the proper point of getting stuffed - keep mixing. if the patty sticks to your palm for a good 3-5 secs before falling off, it's ready and stuff away. once we stuffed the sausages, we learned a few fancy linking techniques... ok, it was just one (see below). looks pretty awesome don't it? 

as a reward, we finished off the class by taking home approx. 2lbs of the breakfast and chorizo sausages (schweee!). doing a simple pan-fry of both sausages (ya ya, no picture - this girl was too eager to try it) the breakfast sausage was pretty complex, it had an initial sweet flavor profile but finished off a bit peppery and spicy. the chorizo was straight on garlicky with a kick of heat... both super good.

overall the class was fun and quite informative. hopefully i'll have an opportunity to make my own sausages but that will require the purchase of a meat grinder and sausage stuffer (oh the jokes...) at some point in the near future. 

(breakfast sausage fancy linking)