Follow up information from the basic butchering and sausage making workshop. Remember that if you having a go for the first time, don’t worry you are not doing it professionally, so if you end up with lots of cut up hacked bits of meat you can send it all through a mincer and use it for sausages, or you might ace it and end up with a beautiful piece of loin or rolled shoulder for roasting. Whatever way you do it, it will be delicious!
Butchering Tools
- Large Hacksaw/Butchers saw.
- boning knife (medium length thin and fairly flexible) make sure it is extremely sharp.
- A chopping knife, or a carving knife will do, for cutting up chunks for mincing.
- Chopping board(s) that cover the length of the meat.
- Wet Cloth/Sponge for wiping your blade.
- Knife sharpener/steel
- bowls for mincing meat, funk (waste) meat, bones, somewhere to put cuts to one side to create space for working.
I have this fantastic, and very old, resource that quickly identifies the different cuts of pork/wild boar and what you can potentially use them for. It is also the same partitions that I cut up the boar in (depending where you go you can be shown different combinations/uses).
Recipes
Resources:
| Skins AKA “Casings” | You can purchase skins online or from larger supermarkets and butchers. The largest useable is Ox they are used for making salami sized products. Hog/Pork Casings are for the larger “banger” sized sausages. Sheep/Mutton Casings are for chipolatas. |
| Mincer | Hand Cranked, Electric or get your butcher to mince it to your required ground. |
| Stuffer | Hand Cranked, Electric (Most electric Mincers will adapt to stuff) or use a filling funnel with the end trimmed to roughly the diameter of the sausage you want to make and use the handle of a wooden spoon to stuff manually. |
| Rusk | you can buy commercial rusk very cheaply, you can use ground up childrens whole grain cereal or make your own from breadcrumbs 70% semolina 20% and plain flour 10% you want to add roughly 5% rusk to the volume of meat Including seasoning. |
| Salt | you want to add 10g fine salt to 1kg of sausage, more if you rather, but no less. |
Here are the recipes and in each case the quantities are enough for 1kg of meat.
Herby ones.
- About 20 sage leaves
- 20 chives
- 5 sprigs of thyme stripped from stalk
- 1tsp of Marjoram or a small bunch
- fresh ground black pepper.
White pepper (my personal favorite as it shows off the meat)
- 1 heaped dessert spoon of white pepper.
- Extra salt to taste.
Spiced Apple Sausages
- 100g apples
- 1 tablespoon of calvados brandy (more if you like)
- 2 tsp of mixed spice
- 1 tsp lemon zest
- 2 tsp of brown sugar
- 1tsp ground black pepper
One last favorite thing to do is to make some sausage rolls with puff pastry and simply splatter with english mustard, combine with a cup of tea….heaven!
Most of all i hope you had fun and took some new skills and knowledge away with you.
Tom
This was a great workshop! Lots of learning. Especially useful for me was how to make uniform links out of home stuffed sausage. Tom is an enthusiastic and knowledgeable instructor, who gave us an expert demonstration on basic butchery and sausage making. An added bonus was being able to taste the sausages he made. Great stuff!