first attempt at pork sausage with hog casings

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first attempt at pork sausage with hog casings

Postby sunbelt56 » Tue Oct 31, 2017 4:51 pm

I made some turkey sausage about 6 months ago using a Dakota stuffer with mixed results, so:

I just bought a grinder/stuffer attachment for my Kitchen Aid mixer and found a couple recipes for pork sausage (2 pounds). I had a couple problems and I was wondering about a few things too:

Problems:

1) The Kitchen Aid grinder attachment really struggled (almost bogging down), with the pork butt. I thought there was some hide or skin that it was binding up on. I know from using my old cast iron hand crank grinder that you can't grind skins (turkey). So that's what I used and it seemed to work.

2) I went back to the Kichen Aid attachment to stuff the sausage and the sliding on of the natural hog casing to the horn was really a chore. It would not slide on very easy like it does in the YT videos I watched. I think maybe I didn't rinse out the insides of the casings enough. They soaked for over an hour. I even tried taking the horn off, putting some water into it with the casing still attached, then reattaching the horn, let the water go back into the horn while holding up the other end of the casing. As a result the sausage was packed really tight. I couldn't make any links out of it. (only made about 2 feet).

Questions:

1) Can I just put the unused casings back in the bag and store them in the fridge? I only soaked 2 strands. I used about 1/2 of the first one since I only did 2 pounds.

2) The book I was reading (Rytek Kutas) said not to use iodized salt to store the casings. I used some pink sea salt, since that's all I have.

3) I have about 10 pounds of venison in the freezer someone gave me over a year ago. I hope it's still good. I was thinking about just sawing it in about 4 pieces so it would thaw out faster.
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Re: first attempt at pork sausage with hog casings

Postby NCPaul » Wed Nov 01, 2017 10:42 am

I use a Kitchen Aid grinder and I've found that it requires the pork butt to be trimmed of all inter muscular tissue, silver skin and soft fat. I spend more than twice as much time trimming as grinding. The meat will need to be par frozen (cold and dry to the touch, but not solid) to grind cleanly. If the meat is frozen solid, the augur will be trying to cut the meat and the grinder will bog down. If there is too much sinew, the grinder will struggle with cutting. The collar holding the blade and plate only needs to be finger tight, it will bog down if it over tightened. It should come out in nice ropes. You will need to add fat to the pork to adjust the meat to fat ratio.
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Re: first attempt at pork sausage with hog casings

Postby NCPaul » Wed Nov 01, 2017 3:01 pm

To save the hog casings you have left, wring out what water you can then bury them in kosher salt, completely cover. When you want to use them, rinse them, then let them soak for at least 4 hrs. You can even soak them overnight in the fridge.

The venison will need careful trimming to grind with the Kitchen Aid and will need fat as well.
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Re: first attempt at pork sausage with hog casings

Postby Vermis » Thu Nov 02, 2017 10:06 am

I have limited experience, but what it tells me is that sausage casings stick to plastic sausage tubes like velcro. Had it happen with a plastic hand-mincer kit and the plastic tubes I got with a cast iron version. I don't know if it's a problem with soaking, but the same skins, soaking (roughly) the same amount of time, were much less of a problem with stainless steel tubes.
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Re: first attempt at pork sausage with hog casings

Postby wheels » Thu Nov 02, 2017 11:40 pm

You need to ensure that you get water down the inside of the skins. They also don't need to be on too larger horn.

HTH

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Re: first attempt at pork sausage with hog casings

Postby sunbelt56 » Sat Nov 04, 2017 1:51 pm

What worked for me (just made 6# of Chorizo) is I put the pre-soaked casings in a small bowl of water just under the horn and sprinkled water on top of the casings that is on the horn and it worked great. Apparently, the water soaks threw the casing from outside onto the horn. I also found that sometimes you have to pull the casings back off a ways and straighten it back out if it doesn't go on evenly.
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