Sausages and salami

More sausages from the mince I'd done yesterday.
I used up the 1 1/5 kg of pork mice to make 11 sausages and one big salami.
I used up all the hog skin that I hadn't used first time, about 1.5m. I was a bit short.
I wonder if the sala
One of the articles I read suggested using a stand mixer with dough hook to mix the meat and herbs. I ended up breaking the stand mixer as I used the wooden spoon to try and push down the meat in the bowl, it jambed the hook and there was a clunk, now it seems to half go. So I will have to make some bread to see if it still works. That has been a great tool so I'll need to get another mixer if that's broken and be more careful next time.
The pork had been minced once so it was a bit of a pain as the fat clogged the sieve. Actually, I think I may have had the blade the wrong way around. Duh!!!!
Anyway, I ended up making another mix with some added garlic but forgot to put in the chilli chips. I also reduced the salt to 1 1/2 % so hopefully not as salty.
I ended up filling a salami skin too and used the same mix, I have that in the biltong box with the first fan as the other died. That is a shame as it was handy and went for a long time.
I ended up with a 2 ssausage length, a four and five sausage length and 3 patties that I'll try too.
I was a bit dissapointed in the last sausage pattie I made as it was too sugary and sweet, far less brown sugar next time.
I'm waiting for the beef to thaw at the moment so I can push it through the grinder and see if having the blade the other way around makes a difference.

It was very messy so I've decided to carry on mincing the beef as I want to do one cleanup at the end.
I need to soak more guts to make sausage. But I want to test with the blade the other way around.

I had the blades the wrong way around. It minced the beef great on rough and fine so the process is easier and less messy than I thought.

This looks interesting, 3% salt to meat ratio.  Also use string to tie, rather than trying to knot the skin.

I ended up using these mixes:

I allowed for 2% salt and am using beef rather than pork.

Hopefully the salami wil dry well. I waas finding it difficult getting the skin on the nozzle. I may have to look for a different nozzle thats thinner. Mayber moore wilsons.

meat mincer and sausages

The email for the casing came with:

Casings

Most of our casings are tubed. Soak the natural casings on the tubes overnight, after soaking, take them off the tube stretching them to the full length, before sliding them on the filler tube of the sausage stuffer. 

NEVER SOAK COLLAGEN CASINGS.

Casings do have a smell.
When the casings arrive you will notice a smell, (Sheep casings more then
hogs casings) this is normal and you do not have to be concerned.
This is what I found on the net for you.
"My casings smell bad, are they still good?
Usually Yes. When your natural casings first arrive there may be some gas
build up in the bag, especially in hot weather. This can smell pretty strong.
What can I do to knock out the bad smell in my casings?
Usually, all it needs is airing out. Leave the bag open in the cooler for a
while. Or, take casings out of the bag and air them out. If it is really bad,
rinse casings in freshwater, re-soak in brine and the smell will usually
dissipate.
Putting baking soda in your soak water may also help."
My experience is that when you keep them in the fridge most of the smell
will disappear and when you soak and rinse them according to instructions it
will not be noticeable in the taste of your sausages.

The casings are cured in salt and we advise to store them in the fridge.
When stored in the fridge they will keep for a very long time (years)
Have you got any leftovers? Place them in a container and add plenty of salt.
Store them in the fridge.
This vid seems to be worth following :

I'll give it a try, as I've a couple of kilo's of pork shoulder I've got to mince first, as well as some beef. 

• skinned the pork shoulder, cut out the bone. 
• scored the pork skin which I will cook in air fryer for crackling. 
• put the bone in the air fryer just to cook a little and I'll freeze it for puttin in a soup stock later. 
• cut up the pork and fat and put in a ziplock bag and put in freezer. (Some video's suggest easier to grind if meat frozen, otherwise fat gets all stringy. 

I've cut some nice lean bit of pork up to do a pork sweeet and sour. See that blog.

Sat 18th April, making sausages

I took the pork from the freezer, it was  quite solid, so I had to let it thaw before I could break pieces off to be able to put in the tube. 
 I used the middle sieve on the meat mincer but after a while it clogged up, there was a fil m of fat on the inside that blocked the holes, especially near the center, and the blade got clogged with fat too. On reverse nothing really happened. 
I di find the pizza slot , very course plate, worked pretty effectively with the cold meat, not as well on the 2nd run once the meat had warmed up a bit. 
I threaded the pig skin onto the nozzle, I'd soakd it overnight in water, then put it into a pottle in the fridge as I didn't use it the next day. The nozzle was a bit big and it took a while to thread the skin onto the nozzle. 
I'd cut a 2m length off to use for the first batch. The overall length is 10m. 
I ground some pork up, about 35o g and mixed it with some parsley, salt, pepper and chilli flakes. I use 2% of salt by meat weight, s about 7g which I weighed on the scale. 
  I mixed it all up and then used the nozzle to put the sausage in the skins. Because the nozzle is quite big, some air got in, and I had to reshape the sausages after to get rid of excess air. 
It all went pretty well, but that batch, 350g only made about 3 1/2 sausages. I shaped them into 4. So 2 normal sized ones and 2 small. It only came to about 500mm lenth of skin so I left the rest on the nozzle, put some water in a ziplock bag and removed the air and left it in the fridge. 

 you can see the clogged nozzle in the above image

 Some rough ground (left bowl) and some medium ground.

 I decided to cook 2 in air fryer and 2 in frying pan. They all came out good and very tasty, I was really please with the end result. Very filling too. I might lighten up on the salt next time around and only use maybe 1 1/2 percent rather tan 2% salt per meat weight. They tasted fresh and tasty, they had good flavour too, I am very pleased with the result. 
The rough sieve has quite chunky mince and that may be good for bratwurst type sausages, or toulouse ones. I need to do some research on sausage types. 
A bit of effort but a very pleasing result.


  

Salami

On curing the meats I have been watching videos on sausages and salami's. What has put me off with these is getting the skins, also mincing the meat and pushing it into the tubes. In fact, it all seemed a little complicated.
My specific issue was trying to find out where I could get my hands on some skins. And that is not that simple either as to do you use natural or man-made skins?
On looking online there are skins on offer, of both sorts, in NZ. Trade Me seems to have a few listings and there are a couple of boutique suppliers. An issue I have is the quantities, I don't want to buy a massive anmount just to find i'm not interested in taking it further, so I want to buy some skins in small quantities.
At the end there were a couple of places and i chose the Christchurch Oskar butchers to order online from. Their delivery was cheaper than the Boutique in Auckland, for them the cost of delivery was more expensive than the small product I wanted to purchase. I only wanted to purchase a small amount to try. I got them at Oskar Butchers. 
So I thought I'd try the simplist one which is fibrous Salami Casings 50mm dia and there are 5 of them. Here is the link to what I'm getting :
https://oskarbutcher.co.nz/product/fibrous-salami-casings/
One thing I noted about the casings was that they have holes in to allow the air/moisture to escape from the meat inside.
I got an email with a link to some recipes, which is a nice touch:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Q6AQVxFelBcmlN_Dum8jZOlY54hsDNVd1udfnCsxLDU
Also one for making your own cold smoker:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gDs416oEJFLJGil5JuPPGuvNnW4GINoZXAsPoiflFrk

 So I'll wait for the skins and give it a try. I'm interested in hanging them in the Biltong box and also in the fridge. 
The cool italian dude has a few sausage and salami videos and I'll watch them before I make the salami. 
It seems with the salami tyou use a mix of meats so you may need to grind your meats up. There are these types of grinders on Trade Me for about $60 + Delivery (8-10$). They will do the sausage stuffing too with attachments.

 I intend to try out the Salami making manually first of all, and if that works out well I may plan to move onto making sausages and outher skinned meats.

11th March

The skins came yesterday. They are about 50mm diameter & about 400mm long, a bit longer but you have to tie the ends. There are 5 of them.

I've been watching videos on how to make salami, I quite like the mixture in this video, it looks pretty straightforward.

 INGREDIENTS:
 - minced shoulder of pork (2.5kg) 
- 3% salt to the weight of the meat (75g) 
- chilli (30g) - cracked black peppercorns 40g
- orange zest (1 orange) 
- 350ml wine 
- sausage casings


I started to look at how much meat I'd need to fill a single casing.
So using Pi x R Squared (area of a circle) x 400mm long to get volume I get .75l (or .00075m3)

Then I went looking for the density of pork mince, which is not easy to find, there are some variations.
So I have a litre volume, but need to relate to a weight, so density is what is needed.
I seem to have a number about 1033kg/m3  for pork mince so slightly higher than water of 1000kg/m3
So slightly higher than the weight of water, so if I need .75kg of water I'll need about .8kg of mince.
That seems a bit excessive for a simgle salami. I think I may have my maths wrong.

The other thing that is a bit daunting is getting the sausage meat into the casing. I'll have to use a spoon and maybe the top cut off the top of a bottle to act as a funnel.
I may just have to go with his recipe and weights and see how many I fill.