Last week I had my new mincer/sausage making machine delivered. It attaches to my Kenwood Chef and today the skins and herbs I ordered turned up. As I was all excited to try this new kit I went to waitrows and bought a shoulder of pork (3lb), some belly pork (1.5lb) and a bag of granny smiths. So my gf & I set about making some sausages.
We put the hog casings into soak in warm water, cut the meat up into pieces, threw a glass of red wine on it and assembled the mincer (with the medium cutter). We fed the meat into the mincer and were amazed that it didn't need pushing with the plunger it just went threw itself. We then minced the apple, put some sage, pepper and bread crumbs on the minced meat and apple. When trying to mix it together I soon realised we'd made a mistake! Mixing such a large amount together is hard work, we should have mixed it together before we fed it into the mincer, then the mincer would have done the hard work for us. We then took the cutter out of the mincer and replace it with a tube, so it was now a sausage stuffer. We swilled the hog casings through with water (don't they look like condoms), fed them onto the tube and started feeding our sausage meat into the hopper. I tied a knot in the end of the skin and switched the machine on. Filling the sausage skins was quite easy until one of the skins split (I think I was being too rough with it). Once filled I tried to turn them into hands, like I've seen @ the butchers, this was partialy successful. Anyhow it was 11pm when we finished (so it took 3hrs) and we finally got to try the first sausages, which we cooked in the health grill. My first thought was that they were much more meaty than shop sausages and less fatty. I think I put in too much sage and I needed a little more fat. Also the apple almost disappeared, so I think this either needs to be cut fine and not minced next time, or minced on the course setting. But it was a fun few hours and as a first batch they were good. It'll be interesting to see how they bbq this w/e. Anyhow thanks for all your chatter on this forum, as it's this that gave me loads of ideas.