Monday, January 2, 2012

New Year!

Hello everyone, and welcome to 2012! 

My New Year's Eve celebration involved good food and great friends.  Specifically, I learned the fine art of sausage making, starting with the ground pork and spices.


I was surprised to learn that natural casings come packed in salt and refrigerated (usually with an ice pack in the package).  Before you use the casings, you must repeatedly soak and rinse them to make them more pliable and to rid them of the salt.


After the soaking, the casings get pushed onto a spout at the bottom of the sausage filling apparatus.  The apparatus is a cylindrical container with a press at the top and the spout at the bottom.  The filling gets scooped into the apparatus and pressed down and out into the casing.  So simple!

We ended up with about six feet of delicious pork sausage that was rolled nicely.

In the above picture, the sausage is getting poked with a toothpick to release some of the moisture in the filling. 

The sausage making process was fascinating, and something that I think most people could do at home.  Maybe I will get a sausage stuffer and some local pork from Mockingbird Farm and make my own!

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