Hi everyone. As promised I would post the final pictures of my pet project. After a few test smokes, on Saturday May 31, My wife and I decided to make 30 lbs of Smoked Polish sausage and put the house and ourselves to the test. We never cut, ground, mixed and stuffed sausage so Saturday was a very long day for us. I am sorry that we did not take pictures of the processing, but it was only the two of us doing all the work. We were hoping that we were going to get help from our children, but you know everyone is busy on the weekends.
We used 30lbs of fresh pork butts obtained from our local butcher. Our spices were obtained from the Sausage Maker (Polish Sausage) Our grinder/stuffer is the famous Northern Tools #32 fly wheel grinder, with a 1/2 hp electric motor.
After boning and cubeing 3 to 4 inch pieces we fired up the grinder. the first 2 to 3 pieces the motor stalled and started to smoke. I think I need a bigger electric motor! We then decided to recut the meat into 1 inch pieces, and everything went well after that. We slowly fed the pieces into the hungary machine. One must be extreamly careful in feeding this beast, as your fingers wont last long if they get into the hopper.
After all thirty lbs were ground, my wife mixed the meat with plenty of water and spices, so far everything is going great. Then we rinsed our casings and converted the grinder into a stuffer.
As both of us have never done any of this before we took our time and thought everything through. My wife fed the casing as I tried to manually turn the grinder fly wheel. As I soon found out the electric motor worked a lot better, in fact it stuffed better than it ground. Stuffing went very easy and my wife only had about 3 to 4 blow outs, which is not bad for the first try!
As we started at about 10 am we are now looking at 2pm when we finally got the smoke house loaded. If you look close enough in the picture you can see the sausage hanging.
As you can see we sucessfully finished our sausage. We pulled it at 2 am, which I figured it would take approx 12 hours to complete.
The end result is that we have the best tasting Polish smoked sausage this side of the Mississippi, and this was our first time!
In looking back I think I will look for a bigger electric motor and shanghi some volunteers. Also I think that we will make 50 lbs, as it takes the same amount of work to make 50 lbs as it does to make 30 lbs.
Please let me know what you think, as I could use some pointers. In the mean time we are enjoying the fruits of our labor. I am sorry about any misspelling, as I can not get the spell check to work. I also will post the pictures on a different thread, as I don't want to lose this post. In other words we have a hard time trying to figure out this photo bucket thing.
We used 30lbs of fresh pork butts obtained from our local butcher. Our spices were obtained from the Sausage Maker (Polish Sausage) Our grinder/stuffer is the famous Northern Tools #32 fly wheel grinder, with a 1/2 hp electric motor.
After boning and cubeing 3 to 4 inch pieces we fired up the grinder. the first 2 to 3 pieces the motor stalled and started to smoke. I think I need a bigger electric motor! We then decided to recut the meat into 1 inch pieces, and everything went well after that. We slowly fed the pieces into the hungary machine. One must be extreamly careful in feeding this beast, as your fingers wont last long if they get into the hopper.
After all thirty lbs were ground, my wife mixed the meat with plenty of water and spices, so far everything is going great. Then we rinsed our casings and converted the grinder into a stuffer.
As both of us have never done any of this before we took our time and thought everything through. My wife fed the casing as I tried to manually turn the grinder fly wheel. As I soon found out the electric motor worked a lot better, in fact it stuffed better than it ground. Stuffing went very easy and my wife only had about 3 to 4 blow outs, which is not bad for the first try!
As we started at about 10 am we are now looking at 2pm when we finally got the smoke house loaded. If you look close enough in the picture you can see the sausage hanging.
As you can see we sucessfully finished our sausage. We pulled it at 2 am, which I figured it would take approx 12 hours to complete.
The end result is that we have the best tasting Polish smoked sausage this side of the Mississippi, and this was our first time!
In looking back I think I will look for a bigger electric motor and shanghi some volunteers. Also I think that we will make 50 lbs, as it takes the same amount of work to make 50 lbs as it does to make 30 lbs.
Please let me know what you think, as I could use some pointers. In the mean time we are enjoying the fruits of our labor. I am sorry about any misspelling, as I can not get the spell check to work. I also will post the pictures on a different thread, as I don't want to lose this post. In other words we have a hard time trying to figure out this photo bucket thing.
