I mentioned in the first installment of this series that I had a way to deal with the fact we cannot get chipolata sausages here in Pocatello, and that it would be arriving Wednesday, well it did. What arrived, along with knitting needles for Coowee were sausage casings, but hog and sheep. The two together were only 3 dollars more than the sheep, so I figured why not. By now the truth should be clear, we plan on making our own chipolata sausage for the pigs in a blanket. As I have done only a little sausage making, I chose to use a recipe, specifically this one here.

First thing we had to do is soak the casings. They come packed in salt to keep them fresh. I pulled out three 6 foot long sections. The recipe called for 12, but who knows. I left them to soak and started assembling the ingredients, or the best I could. We could not find pork shoulder (or at least not labeled as such) so we used some pork loin. I was just about 5 grams short on the pork, so I added 5 grams of the pork belly to compensate. Then came the spices. Normally I like recipes that deal in weight over volume, but with the spices it was a bit difficult, in part due to the fact our scale only does grams, not tenths of. I had to approximate to get the 1.5 grams of sage and thyme. Well I would have, save we had no thyme. The wife had used the last of it a few weeks ago, and I forgot. I ended up using an herb mix we have that had thyme, but also sage, rosemary, marjoram, mustard seed, and savory. The one spice we did have, that is not common is mace. Well we have blade mace, not ground mace. Mace comes from the lacy membrane that surrounds a nutmeg seed. I have it to make garam masala for chai tea. As I needed it ground I used my trusty mortar and pestle to achieve this.  I did not take pictures of the onion or bread crumbs as I figured you all know what those look like.

A few years back Valah got me both the food grinder and the sausage stuffer attachments for our Kitchen aid stand mixer (I also have three pasta rollers for it). I do not use it often, as I do not often need to grind meat or veggies, but it does come in handy for some things, like making chipolata sausages. After grinding I mixed everything together to make a not exactly attractive looking paste.

Then came the part I was afraid of, the stuffing. I am not a big fan of fiddly things, even if I do make fiddly recipes (the first time I made ravioli using my new pasta rollers I chose a kind that has a raw egg yolk in the center. It was fiddly, but good). I am a big guy and not all that good with finesse, and several sites I looked at made it clear that sheep casings were fiddly and delicate compared to the hog. I did have some issues just trying to get them open to run water through. In the end, though, getting the casings on the tube and stuffing them worked rather well with no issues in fact. Valah helped, just making sure the sausage coiled as I pushed the meat mix into the machine. I had one issue with the twisting, that area was a bit over full and burst through the casing. I cut those off and started again with great success. I had one other with a hole that, once they were all twisted, I cut out of the chain. This left me with three links that were not quite perfect. So, that was a good time to fry them up and try them.

We all agree these are some killer sausages. I am glad the recipe makes a large amount, we will be having these for breakfast tomorrow. If other homemade sausage recipes are as good as this, we have debated making a batch of sausage once a month or so. We are not certain on that, but sometime in the new year I plan on making some bangers, getting some back bacon and ordering proper English baked beans and some HP sauce to do a full English one morning,