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Sausages

Steve Maskery

Steve Maskery

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I've no wish to hijack Cabinetman's excellent culinary thread, so I thought I'd start this. Sausages.

All cultures around the world make sausages, and I have travelled a lot. I know I am biased, but in my mind the best sausages in the world are British Bangers,
AJB Temple said:
Any mince of any kind that I use is minced by me, including for sausages.
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Has anyone else made their own sausages?

I went on Steve Lamb's River Cottage course a few years ago, a most very excellent day out. I've since made sausages a few times. The problem is that I am the only one who eats them, I live with a vegetarian. Fine by me. But it also means that making sausages in small quantities is difficukt from a seasoning point of view.

France has a reputation for having the best cuisine in the world. It is no longer deserved.

Yes, I can buy sausages here. The best I have found are Toulouse. There are also Mergues, which are spicy. I like spicy food, but I don't like Merguez. They do chipolatas too. They are all solid meat. No rusk, not much seasoning. If they are solid meat, I'd rather have a steak. It's hard work. All very disappointing.

I did make my own sausages back in the UK. We used to have a local Bird's. Their Olde English were fantastic. When I enquired what was in them, they wer very secretive and coy. I have since learned that "Olde English" comes as a commercial blend in a big jar from an industrial supplier.

I want to make excellent sausages in modest quantities (say a kilo at a time), but one small cockup in the blend gives me 20 sausages I don't want to eat.

My standard recipe is a mix of pork shoulder and belly, 1% salt, 3/4 of that as pepper, some mace and nutmeg. 10% breadcrumb. Loosen as required with milk..

If I want to push the boat out, I make Sheftalia. Fantastic. Lamb, garlic, parsley, red wine, caul fat (which I can get quite easily in my local supermarket, 3 days order).But lamb is both expensive and difficult to find here.

Who else makes their own bangers and what recipe do you use?
S
 
Never made my own Steve, I lived in Lincolnshire where excellent sausages abound, well not so much nowadays unfortunately. But now I’m over here where most food has some kind of spice or chilli added which just means your throat is damaged - they seem to think that it makes the food more interesting lol. But sausages over here? Terrible.
 
Well, obviously I make them as quoted above. I make batches of about 5kg of minced meat and use various home developed recipes. Usually pork based. Five kg of meat is used to do a few different recipes. So in some cases I will add sharp apple, sometimes apricot, sometimes black pudding or white pudding and some onion - all run through the mincer to get consistent texture. Usually I use a coarse mincer blade in a semi pro electric mincer, but if making sausage rolls then I mince finer. We got a Tre Spade sausage stuffing machine s/h from eBay. It does 10kg but can do smaller batches with very little wastage. It has different sized nozzles. Really needs one person to wind the handle whilst the other one manipulates the skin off the nozzle. It's best to get the skins with the blue starter chute I find - makes life a lot easier.

I always add my own blend of home grown herbs. Can be fresh or dried. (You can air dry them or do them in a dehydrator) I also use a mix of pork shoulder and belly - but bear in mind we buy half pigs and use all of it - cured ham at one end, belly for porchetta or crispy pork belly, head for pate etc, shoulder and remaining belly for sausage or pies. Sometimes I give pork belly a light smoking in the green egg before mincing, especially if I intend to add something like paprika.

I'm quite careful to have sufficient fat content in sausages. I don't use rusk. I've tried it but I prefer panko. If I don't have panko to hand (we use quite a lot of it for vegan dishes and coatings for fish etc) I run 2 day old home made bread through a Vitamix blender then dry them in the oven prior to use. I mix this into the sausage meat by hand and by eye to get what I think is the right texture. Panko is pretty cheap to buy in 1kg bags.

I only use natural skins for sausages. I get these either from our butcher or the excellent https://www.weschenfelder.co.uk/sausage-casings-skins.html. They also supply the curing ingredients I use for salami etc. Sausages freeze well. I lightly vac pac them in batches if I freeze them. If we do a garden opening for charity, we may well get through 100 sausages in baps and 140 sausage rolls in a day, so it is worth planning ahead. However, we've stopped garden opening now.

I don't make German style sausages at all. The German preference is a completely different mix - much more finely minced as well. Usually in synthetic (but edible) casings.
 
I can't allow a conversation on this topic without including the obligatory Yes Minister clip


I'm also a big fan of decent British sausages but we're lucky to have an excellent butcher very close. My parents recently moved from this area down to East Sussex and my father regularly bemoans the fact he can't find anywhere selling decent sausages down there (every time we visit we have a standing obligation to show up with a big bag of sausages for their freezer).
 
Current regulations mean we are not supposed to bring sausages here from the UK any more.
Those made here are very fatty whether supermarket bought or butcher. Rusk or crumb of any sort seems to be never used.
 
My late Italian neighbour (her husband was a prisoner of war who stayed but went back to marry her and brought her back) showed me one day. They were pork based and as I can remember, which might not be accurate, she added salt and garlic, and they were coarsely minced. They were fattish and tasted lovely. :)
 
We are very lucky to have John Coleman butchers near us. They have a van in Sudbury market which we buy all our meat from.
Yesterday we had boar and apple sausages with homemade ratatouille very nice. They do a range of good sausages, old English, JC specials are one of my favourites.
 
Cabinetman said:
But sausages over here? Terrible.
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How very dare you! :)

Geography influences preference. Although it has been a long time since I lived in the U.S., I miss the traditional country sausage link or patty with breakfast. I never developed a taste for the purée in a tube that passes for British sausages, but do like the white and black puddings. If you put a full English breakfast in front of me, I will certainly eat it. However, given the choice between that and a plate of buttermilk biscuits with sausage gravy that I grew up with, I'll pass on the full English.
 
I read an undercover report in the Times conducted, admittedly some years ago, on a processing plant producing sausages for Richmond and Tesco amongst others.
The author concluded with the statement that she would not allow the products into her home from that point.
 
^^ Agreed. Part of the problem is that despite negative impact on animal welfare, DEFRA policy has resulted in local slaughterhouses closing en masse, and slaughter centred in big processing centres, which can be many road miles away. Some (all?) of these places use high pressure water shockwave processing (HDP of HPP) to recover all meat, fat and sinew from a stripped carcass. This goes into various factory processed foods including sausages, pies and petfood. Some ends up in factory commercial stock production.

I do believe in nose to tail use of a carcass - but it can be taken too far. HPP output is too far for me.
 
There is Heck and there is by'eck Rob. In the premium product they use 97% meat as you say, but they also do a cheap one called the Yorkshire (not sure?) which is about 42% meat "products" I think and so that probably means mechanically recovered. I've got nothing against good quality factory produced sausages, but they are no use to me as we sell sausages at our summer BBQ events so they have to be home made. I would say the cost of home made is about a quarter of the cost of a premium supermarket sausage and is to a degree using up by product for us.
 
Mike said:
How very dare you! :)

Geography influences preference. Although it has been a long time since I lived in the U.S., I miss the traditional country sausage link or patty with breakfast. I never developed a taste for the purée in a tube that passes for British sausages, but do like the white and black puddings. If you put a full English breakfast in front of me, I will certainly eat it. However, given the choice between that and a plate of buttermilk biscuits with sausage gravy that I grew up with, I'll pass on the full English.
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Haha, I rest my case M’Lud.
I may be wrong but the puréed stuff is the emulsified pressure washed slop that is to be avoided.
 
AJB Temple said:
There is Heck and there is by'eck Rob. In the premium product they use 97% meat as you say, but they also do a cheap one called the Yorkshire (not sure?) which is about 42% meat "products" I think and so that probably means mechanically recovered. I've got nothing against good quality factory produced sausages, but they are no use to me as we sell sausages at our summer BBQ events so they have to be home made. I would say the cost of home made is about a quarter of the cost of a premium supermarket sausage and is to a degree using up by product for us.
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This is the card outer from the Heck bangers recently purchased:

IMG_7372.jpeg

Says nowt about mechanically recovered meat or any reference to 'oop narth' in Yorkshire, so I assume they're the premium article. Skins are beef collagen - Rob
 
I would look no further than Weschenfelder for all sausage needs:

Weschenfelder Home Page

Sausage-making equipment and ingredients including sausage stuffers, natural and collagen casings, mixes, rusk and seasonings.
www.weschenfelder.co.uk www.weschenfelder.co.uk

I have tried their standard, salami, honey roast, venison, Lincolnshire and boerewors mixes, all spot on. It’s nice to mix your own, but as you say, easy to get it wrong for a whole batch and have to work your way through them. Unless, of course, you add ingredients gradually and test a piece in the pan.

Natural, sheep or hog, casings are best. They keep in their salt forever in the freezer, and are much stronger, allowing you to link the sausages in proper threes. Collagen tends to burst.

I generally do at least 80/20 lean/fat, through the coarse plate, then mix in the seasoning, rusk and water (one of those flexible trug buckets is best for this), and back though the mincer on medium or coarse again. Stuff the casings, link up in satisfying repeating bunches of three, then hang overnight somewhere cool to mature before freezing the next day.
 
Yep - you are a premium shopper Rob. :)

When we sell packs of sausages (about twice a year), it's always because people have eaten them at an event. It amuses me when people ask for the recipe (pork & other stuff !) and a lot ask about the salt content. All commercial ones, including Heck, are high salt.
 
Lons said:
I'm a self confessed philistine so I just buy sausages from Costco and M&S, taste OK to me. :ROFLMAO:
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I think I must be a philistine too. I also have an award winning butcher within walking distance, but my goto sausage is the Jolly Hog "Proper Porker" that I buy from Tesco. I used to buy Porky Whites when we lived in Surrey, but you can't find them round here, and I think I prefer the Jolly Hog anyway.
 
Woodbloke said:
According to the blurb on the back, they're 1.4g of salt per 100g of bangers, which doesn't seem too bad especially as I don't cook with or add table salt to a meal - Rob
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There’s a lot of people saying this very low salt intake is bad for us, just lick your skin after getting hot we need quite a bit of salt in our diet just to keep us working. Also what’s the first thing they give you in the ambulance after a heart attack- a saline drip!
Now the Victorians really used a huge amount and that probably wasn’t too good lol.
 
Like any other product there can be a wide variety of quality so if people want to buy enonomy tube paste sausages then they should know what they're getting, exactly the same as buying the the bottom shelf economy rice pud, soup etc. I feel for those families who can afford nothing else and remember my childhood where cheap as chips really was the way to describe it.

I'm the only one in our house who eats sausages, and steak for that matter so the cost is largely unimportant and I'm happy to buy the best I see but I still wouldn't eat something unless I like it, I don't care how high quality or pricey.

Just to add to my philistine image while I drink very little alcohol in any form my choice of red wine is Jammy Red Roo. :ROFLMAO: make of that what you will. During my years managing for companies I've tasted some high end expensive wines but like what I like.

I guess at my age I'm a stubborn old git and quite happy to be so. ;)
 
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Sausages can be like pies, a good place for butchers to put stuff that they could not sell directly as people would be horrified and then you get your nitrates and nitrites to improve something, might be binding. What you don't want to do is to actually think about the process, they grind up many parts of a pig into a toothpaste consistency before squezing this mush back into it's intestines, yes the very place where poo was manufactured.
 
I once had a friend, Khemraj, who didn't eat pork, but he regularly did a shift at Pork Farms making pork pies, to help fund his studies. It didn't make him want to stop being Hindu...
S
 
Another way of looking at Spectric’s point above is, if you can make something tasty out of parts of a pig that would otherwise be thrown away, is that not making the most of resources, and of the life taken? You don’t have to add nitrites - a preservative and used for keeping bacon pink when cooked.

Most modern sausages have alginate casing now, or purified collagen, but natural casings, like the ones I use, are the stripped out submucosa of the small intestine. It’s scraped, rinsed out, inverted on a tube, scraped, rinsed and reinverted and rinsed again and packed in salt. Pretty much pure collagen by this point, and food safe.
 
I suppose my attitude to meat was formed before I was 5. Farming background and my grandfather kept pigs and chickens and sheep and some cattle, plus working horses. Pigs were slaughtered on the farm, and I well remember the process. I fed the "home" pigs every morning before school. I was taught to catch and kill chickens and pluck them and gut them at maybe age 7. Everything else eventually went to the slaughterhouse behind the butcher on 16 High Street - which was walking distance at a push so animals were usually driven there on foot with the dogs. There was another one too in the small town: Snelsons. Caused a lot of congestion at times. With the pigs, nothing was wasted and this was drummed into me.

It took 2 days to kill, bleed and process a pig. All done outside on a big table. Including all of the offal, hams, meat cuts, sausages, etc and the whole family had to help including us children. My dad could haul up an adult pig for slaughter on his own, using a block & tackle, which amazed me as a child.

My mother washed out the intestines for sausages. We had a stock of these kept cleaned and salted. Hams were hung up in some kind of outdoor chimney for smoking, and then in an annexe to the workshop to cure.
 
AJB Temple said:
I suppose my attitude to meat was formed before I was 5. Farming background and my grandfather kept pigs and chickens and sheep and some cattle, plus working horses. Pigs were slaughtered on the farm, and I well remember the process. I fed the "home" pigs every morning before school. I was taught to catch and kill chickens and pluck them and gut them at maybe age 7. Everything else eventually went to the slaughterhouse behind the butcher on 16 High Street - which was walking distance at a push so animals were usually driven there on foot with the dogs. There was another one too in the small town: Snelsons. Caused a lot of congestion at times. With the pigs, nothing was wasted and this was drummed into me.

It took 2 days to kill, bleed and process a pig. All done outside on a big table. Including all of the offal, hams, meat cuts, sausages, etc and the whole family had to help including us children. My dad could haul up an adult pig for slaughter on his own, using a block & tackle, which amazed me as a child.

My mother washed out the intestines for sausages. We had a stock of these kept cleaned and salted. Hams were hung up in some kind of outdoor chimney for smoking, and then in an annexe to the workshop to cure.
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And, goodness me, don’t you eat well after a pig killin’?!

That reminds me, while I have you; do you have a recipe for proper chorizo? I mean the cured stuff, not for cooking, for eating as is. I’ve had it in Spain, spicy and delicious. I can’t replicate the Iberico Bellota grade but surely I can get it close?

I know it’s pork, salt, pimenton (sweet or hot?) and garlic, possibly red wine, but what proportions? Rick Stein showed it being made authentically but unfortunately didn’t give the proportions.
 
Yes. Ian. I am not squeamish. I've worked as a kid in a slaughterhouse and worked on the farm. Livestock was reared for for food, skins and wool. My great grandfather was in WWI on the Somme and as tough as they come, as was my grandfather.

Chorizo - not sure if it is "proper" or not but this is what I do:

Approx 1 Kg pork shoulder - Managalitza if wallet permits, but I usually use middlewhite as readily available to me. Skin off and use for crackling. Dehydrate uncovered in fridge for 48 hours to get rid of excess moisture and age it a bit. I aim for 22% fat content roughly. You might want a bit more. Cube and run through coarse mincer blade that is fresh out of the freezer. Cold blade gives a better product, You want a chunky mince.

Add 40g of smoked paprika, 20 g salt (any salt is fine), 1% max Prague 2, 10g sugar, 6 cloves crushed, 6 cloves finely minced fresh plump garlic (crushed with knife blade and salt - not chopped and don't use the tasteless Chinese stuff), 10 ml of sherry vinegar (ideally aged and good quality) and 40ml of full bodied red wine such as shiraz or rioja. A good grind of black pepper at fine setting (don't go mad). Mix very thoroughly and put in a lidded box for 48 hours in the chiller (fridge) to cure. Mix again. Stuff.Use pig intestines as skins. I don't use saltpetre. But you could in very small quantity - not more than 0.5% by weight.

Some people add a few drops of red food colouring and some add some heavily roasted red peppers. They need to be fully dehydrated in my view. Some add chilli powder or chilli flakes. I don't. Personal taste - it's more Mexican.

If you want to properly cure it, as opposed to cooking, then you just air dry it. If you dont' have one, make a drying cabinet using a punctured plastic box with lid (mesh over the holes) and keep temp and hunidty as consistent as you can (80% ish). Hang in that. Try to ensure air flow. I use Prague No 2 in tiny percentage in the mix (under 1%) and hang with another sausage that is already white mould cured - in the traditional way. (Buy one if necessary). I weigh before hanging and consider it ready when I get 35% weight loss.

Check frequently (every few days) and ensure you are not getting furry mould. Wipe off and adjust air flow / humidity if you do. Take care. Curing is a black art.
 
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I used to make my own sausages before I returned home to Lincolnshire. Now there’s no need. I loved experimenting and came up with an outrageous combination of pork, kidney beans, roasted peppers and cinnamon inspired by Mexican cuisine. It tasted fantastic!
 
AJB Temple said:
.....
It took 2 days to kill, bleed and process a pig. All done outside on a big table. Including all of the offal, hams, meat cuts, sausages, etc and the whole family had to help including us children. My dad could haul up an adult pig for slaughter on his own, using a block & tackle, which amazed me as a child.

My mother washed out the intestines for sausages. We had a stock of these kept cleaned and salted. Hams were hung up in some kind of outdoor chimney for smoking, and then in an annexe to the workshop to cure.
Click to expand...
Ahh, memories; Catching the blood for Black Pudding making, Flash burning the Bristles off with straw, washing the chitlings at the pump, turning them inside-out, kicking the inflated bladder about for a few days, the smell of fat rendering for Rosemary Lard, days of plentiful offal that had to be eaten before it went to waste, the routine of rubbing salt and saltpetre into the bone joints of hams and sides.

The vision of my visiting Grandfather showing off his prowess at sharpening the carving knife and slicing thin slivers of Bacon off a hanging side.
 
Steve - this is what I made when I started on home made sausages https://www.localfoodheroes.com/the-thurlaston-sausage/

Pretty much a basic pork sausage but an easily scaled recipe for making more or less mix.

Skins are a matter of preference. We like more browned outer surface compared to the amount of filling so buy chipolata (sheep casings) skins. Amazon sell skins if weschenfelder is a problem where you are. I get on better with skins in a bag rather than the pre spooled ones.
 
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