Well! We have made sausage!
Here is the low down. We have a Kitchen Aid mixer and my wonderful wife bought me the grinder kit for it. I have used it a few times to grind meat up to make amazing meatloaf (post coming). The weekend presented itself with pork butts for $1.59/lb so sausage was in my future.
I did some Google searching and found Simple Comfort Food and decided to try their recipe. I had all the ingredients on hand as we try to keep a well stocked pantry and I had already ordered some Hog Casings from Amazon.
The stage was set. There were some stuffed hog casings happening! We followed the recipe. Cut up the pork butt and ended up with over 8 pounds.
Cubed up pork butt
Once that was done we separated out 5 pounds and put it in the freezer on a sheet pan. The rest went into a freezer bag to be save for the next batch.
After a couple hours in the freezer the cubes were pretty firm so we went to town on the grinding. The Kitchen Aid attachment comes with two grinder disks and we used the 1/4 inch option. Let me tell you. This thing grinds meat great! Stuffing is another issue that we will get to later.
Once the pork was ground up we mixed all the spices up and added it to the meat in accordance with the recipe. Next it was time to stuff. I had purchased hog casings on Amazon and they were nice. Even size and well packed. We pulled off the amount that I figured we needed and I packed the rest in kosher salt in a mason jar for the next batch.
Added the stuffer tube to the Ktchen Aid. Let me tell you. This is the first time I have been disappointed with our Kitchen Aid. It just sucks at stuffing sausage. In a past life I had one that came with a wooden stuffer tool. I remember it worked pretty well. The new plastic multi tool is not worth the plastic it is made of. We will be buying a dedicated stuffer for the future.
We fought through the crap stuffer and managed to stuff a pretty decent amount of sausage.We made some links and made some into coils.
Into the fridge until the next day to smoke!
I loaded the Pit Boss Pro 4 vertical smoker up with Applewood pellets and got it smoking. Ran it on smoke for about 1 hour and the at 200 for about 2 hours until a probe measured 155 internally.
I took them off and immediately ran them under cold water to bring them down to a lower temp. My reading says this will stop them from drying out. The finished product looks great!
We grilled some up and were unfortunately a little disappointed. The smoke was great but the flavor just wasn’t there.
I feel like the spices in the recipe are lacking. I totally appreciate the basis for the spices but feel like the addition of onion powder and some paprika would wake these things up. We vac packed them with our Food Saver machine and will enjoy them in multiple dishes but will probably do a little editing to the recipe in the future.
All in all a fun experience and one that we will totally repeat. Dig in! Make Sausage!!!