When I went to the freezer the other day to get the Italian sausage to make the lasagna I came to a horrible conclusion: this was my last package. No links, none in bulk, no sweet, and no spicy. Time to get off my lazy a$$ and make some. Tracy was headed into town yesterday morning with a planned stop at Costco. She picked me up a 16.4# double pack of boneless butts. As soon as she got home I immediately set about making some sausage. It's the sin of all sins for us to be out of Italian sausage!!
Here's my butt....well not really
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All the tools needed for cutting it up
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First pan cut up. I always go 2 oz over to make up for the wad of meat that always gets stuck in the grinder
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Second pan
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Both pans ready to go into the freezer to chill
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Will be stuffing some and bagging some in bulk. Since it's small batches being stuffed, was not worth getting the big stuffer out so used the jerky cannon
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Spices all mixed up. Spicy on the left and sweet on the right
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Got a section of casing soaking
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I add spices to the meat in layers as it's grinding. Makes mixing much more efficient
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First batch all mixed up
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Jerky cannon loaded, casing onto the stuffing horn, and got my measuring table out. We're ready to go
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I run these in 13" links, hold the casing at the 6 1/2" point and massage the casing to move the meat around before twisting. This greatly reduces the chance of a blowout. I get two 6" links, which are perfect for sausage sammies. Fuzzy pic....sorry.
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Three double links of both flavors. the rest will be vac sealed in bulk
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All done. Total I got 14 meals of sausage for a cost of just slightly over $20. When pork butt goes on sale for $.99 a pound, you can pretty much cut that cost in half.
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This is one of the many incredible, life-changing things I've learned from this forum. It's fun to do and there's just no comparison to store bought. Now the jerky cannon has a bit of a history but to keep it short, I bought one that used the same diameter base for the stuffing horns as the big stuffer. When doing small batches though, it's just not worth the time it takes to clean the big one so I use this. Yes, I have to fill the tube 3 times for each flavor but that's a LOT less time and work that cleaning the big one. Over the past couple weeks I've made these, a batch of breakfast sausage, and a batch of smoked Cajun sausage. It had been a while because I was on a massive sausage making binge for a long time and we had a stockpile of stuff that was a bit over the top. Then all of a sudden I look up and we're running out. Not a good thing once you get used to having it readily available.
Oh well....I've eaten up enough bandwidth....again. See y'all on the next one
Robert