My husband has been keen to try his hand at making sausages for years - so we finally decided to give it a go. I mean, how hard could it be? Well... a lot harder than we thought as it turned out!
I tracked down some sausage casing - and found that this doesn't come in handy home-experiment lengths! I had to buy a package of 50 metres of salted white tubing. There seemed to be miles of the stuff!
We minced up our meat with some herbs and seasonings and chopped off a length of casing. Ready to begin...
The mincer was manual, so it was all hands on deck -
- turning the handle,
- feeding in the "sausage meat" mix,
- keeping the casing on the nozzle,
- encouraging the mix to fill the casing
- and then twisting between the sausages.
Anyway, after an absolute AGE, we finally produced enough sausages for a meal.
Off to the barbecue to taste the fruits of our labours.
It all started nicely... and then, suddenly they all burst out of the casings!
Not pretty!
End result - the meat tasted lovely but the casings were horribly chewy and I confess to picking mine off and discarding them!
There's obviously much more to the art of successful sausage making that meets the eye! Though our experiment was fun and we had lots of laughs along the way, I'm sticking to making "skinless" sausages from now on!
How about you? Had any interesting culinary adventures you'd like to share?
