sausages, day two

yes, the sausage casings can be a pain-in-the-ass. while untangling them i thought about the finance guy in grad school. it was late friday night and our project group was about to quit for the evening. the finance guy (a hewlett packard exec and unofficial group leader) sipped his bud light and said "ok so when do we start tomorrow?" I said after ten, i'm going garage sale-ing. the finance guy looked around at the other group members and said, "garage sales are for people who don't value their time." ass hole.
sausage making is time consuming. i prefer recipes where the allotted time is expressed in minutes, not hours, unless there's a large hunk of meat involved. when recipes are expressed in days (like this one) i tend to chuckle and move on. but sausage is different. particularly if you don't have a Salumi or Schaller+Weber around the corner. it's a great weekend project.
Saturday i bought the pork, fat, casings, and seasonings. decided on two batches. one using seasonings from the Canal House gals (anise and fennel) the other using that ethiopian berbere spice blend. i based my #'s on the ones in Canal House pretty much.

5lb pork 80:20 'trim'
1lb pork fat
30-40 gram salt*
4g fennel seed or ground
4g anise seed or ground
8g sugar
8g pepper
garlic to taste and maybe chives?
splash beer/wine?

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sunday morning i soaked the casing in cold water. they are stored in a very salty liquid which needs to go away. then i took the salt, spices etc and smashed them up in mortar/pestle (all but the chives and liquid). it's hard to really gauge how much casing you need, so if it's in a couple long pieces it's ok. fill sink with water and start flushing the salt out of the casings. drain casings and they are ready to go. now it's good to set up the kitchenaide, outside if it's cold. the meat/fat should stay in the fridge until you're ready to mix meat w/ seasonings. i like to do it in on a big baking tray. quickly spread out cold meat, fat, sprinkle seasonings all over, dribble a few ounces wine/beer, add chives, and mix with fingers 30 seconds or so, then put the tray in the freezer. tie a knot in the far end of a casing length, slide the other end over the stuffer tube, and push the casings all the way up the tube like you're collapsing a slinky and until your knot is at the tip of the stuffer tube. have a toothpick or large needle handy to pop air pockets when stuffing. get out the meat tray and start stuffing on slow and work your way up as you get comfortable, twisting the sausage 5-6 times when you get the desired length. i like doing random lengths and freezing them 2-4 at a time in ziplock bags.
note: it's important that the meat stays cold throughout the process or your sausage will come out with a santorum like consistency. and we wouldn't want that now would we. (for my canadian friends refer to urbandictionary.com to make sense of this).
*note on salt. over salting sucks. you can't fix it. i did this batch with 40 g and it was pushed my salt envelope. if you like supermarket sausage/luncheon meat saltiness 40 g might be ok for you.

we ate the long one last night for dinner, in honor of the finance guy.

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