I made some lamb sausages the other day, inspired by the recipe for Merquez ( I found quite a lot of different recipes).
I used lamb, as pork is not available at the moment (we have swine fever in the country), and I needed to try out my sausage stuffer (LEM 5 lbs vertical sausage stuffer, stainless steel stuffing tubes)
It was also the first time to use sheep casings.
I used the following “recipe”
Lamb mince: 1.2 kg (lamb meat and lamb fat, roughly 30% fat, maybe a bit more)
Garlic, chopped finely: 18 gr
Salt: 12 gr
Harissa paste (store bought): 40 gr
Frozen and chopped coriander leaves/stems: 10 gr (that's what I got left in the freezer )
Paprika powder: 5 gr
Pimento (all spice): 1 gr
Cumin, roasted and ground: 1 gr
Coriander, roasted and ground: 1 gr
Cold water: 100 ml
Sheep casings (soaked for about 1 hour before using)
I toasted 4 gram whole coriander and 4 gram whole cumin together, wait for them to cool down and ground in my coffee grinder and then weighed off 2 gram in total
All the spices & water got mixed in with the mince.
The amount of salt was a bit on the low side on purpose, as there is salt in the ready made harissa paste already.
The mince got worked till it got sticky and easily formed a ball. I took off a bit to fry and put the rest of the mixture in the fridge.
While frying I put a (cleaned) sheep casing on the small stuffer tube. Not easy, but easier once I let the water run through the casing via the tube.
Note to self: put only 1 casing per bowl as they like to get tangled up properly.
The test batch of mince tasted fine, so put the mince in the assembled stuffer and went ahead.
It is a heck of a lot easier than stuffing straight from a hand mincer! I could actually operate the machine by myself.
Stuffing was not much of a problem either, but those sheep casings get filled up very quickly. I managed to get the next ones on the stuffer with the mince still in the tube
Next note to self: do a trial with putting more casings on the stuffing tube before starting to fill them. Should be a lot less messy!
The sausages that came out were quite wet. I may have put too much water in the mix (it should actually have been 75 instead of 100 ml), or maybe the casings were just very wet?
Should I dry out the casings a bit before putting them on the stuffing tube?
When the sausages were finished I put them uncovered in the fridge for an hour or 2, after that I decided to wrap them in tea towel to dry them out a bit more, which seemed to work OK.
I fried one up to use for bar snacks and it everyone here seemed to like it.
I still got to get used to the stuffer, but it definitely is a lot easier and faster than stuffing with my hand mincer!