Consider the Pig: Adventures in Sausage-Making
My mama was the very first Queen of the Cochon de Lait (or, Queen of the Roast Suckling Pig, or just plain “Pig Queen,” as we like to call her) in 1951. I am royalty in the line of pageant swine. For reasons totally unrelated to my hog heritage, my favorite cashier at Dominick’s calls me Miss Pork, and frankly, I’m flattered.
So it is with great pig-love and affection that I share my first foray into the family tradition of sausage-making (without the safety net of the “scoot over and let me show you how to do it” aunts and uncle who taught me the craft).
The story begins with a humble, very rusty cast iron Enterprise Sausage Stuffer and Fruit/Lard Press, procured from Gramma’s Attic antique store in Ottawa, IL. This is the type of stuffer my grandfather and his family used back in the day to make sausage after a traditional
boucherie in Mansura, Louisiana, and our family still swears by the old cast iron beast.
After a bit of research and many calls home to find out how to clean and restore this rust bucket, I found one
terrifying method that would surely have resulted in my early demise (or at the very least, an eviction notice from my landlord), so I settled for a long, grueling go at it with wire brushes, a power drill, a Dremel and a whole ’lotta steel wool. I dismantled the whole rig, and once the rust was knocked off (this took several
weekends of painstaking work to do) I “seasoned” it by boiling each piece, drying the pieces in a hot oven, then wiping everything down with oil. Behold, the beauty:
My only regret in this whole project is that my Uncle Ed, who was the first to teach me the art of sausage making, never saw pictures of the stuffer. He died very suddenly last fall and the shock of his death is still reverberating through the family. I guess we all deal with grief in our own way, and my way was to honor his memory with a sausage-making party.
Three adventurous friends and sausage-making virgins—one, a vegetarian, and all women of different ethnic heritage—showed up with family recipes to make. A Hungarian, a Filipino, a Norwegian, a Louisianian…sounds like the start of a bad joke, but the diversity made for some fine sausage.
I bought 60+? lbs. of pork shoulder at Halsted Packing House and had them bone-out, trim and grind the meat (a coarse “chili” grind), so I ended up with about 40 lbs. of ground pork. The butcher ground the meat and fat separately, which allowed me to “add” as much or as little fat to each recipe as desired. I probably didn’t add as much fat as I should’ve (the sausage is a wee on the lean side for my taste; everyone else seemed to like it fine), but the smell and sight of a bag full of ground pork fat nubbins is not for the faint of heart.
The casings were another issue. The two hanks I bought from Paulina Market had been in the freezer for a while, and appeared to be dried-out when I started soaking them. I was afraid they would tear or burst, and by the time everyone fiddled with the casings and made the requisite jokes about their prophylactic capabilities, they were in a tangled heap.
Fortunately, someone made a call to the meat department at Fox & Obel to see if they sold casings.
Not only did they sell us two pounds of casings at $4/lb (unbelievably cheap, and far more than we needed), the casings were pre-tubed! I have double-checked with the meat guys at F&O to make sure this wasn’t a one-time fluke, and they assured me that they would sell the pre-tubed casings to anyone who asked for them.
For anyone who has ever spent time untangling and loading casing onto a stuffer tube, pre-tubed casings are a
huge timesaver. Just insert the whole plastic sheath onto the tube,
pull the ends of the plastic…
…and voila!
The first batch we made was a Norwegian potato sausage. We ground par-boiled potatoes and onions using my Kitchenaid grinding attachment and mixed it with the remaining ingredients (pork, beef, salt, white pepper, allspice). Next time, I would use a bigger dye to grind the potato-onion mixture because the texture seemed to allow for too much moisture in the mix.
We also mixed up batches of longaniza, a Filipino breakfast sausage, an Asian sausage from Aidell’s Complete Sausage Book (minus the shrimp), and the family recipe that I grew up making (a mixture of cayenne and black pepper and red pepper flakes). Here, we test the mixtures for seasoning and tastiness. I should’ve noticed the lack of fat, but we were at least a few beers into the process, and my pork fat discerning capabilities weren’t 100 percent.
We also discovered, after several batches went through the press, that the plunger plate we were using was the “small” version—used for pressing fruit—not the larger plate needed for stuffing sausage. The larger plate allows less of a gap between the walls of the canister and the plate, so there’s not as much meat squishage up and over the edges. The stuffer didn’t come with the large plate (I’ve ordered one through
Chop-Rite, the company that bought out Enterprise and owns the original designs, and sells replacement parts), so after some tinkering with the set-up, the clever Hungarian came up with the Dominick’s Bag Solution. We laid a few layers of clean bags over the top of the meat and “tucked” the sides down the inner wall of the canister. It wasn’t 100 percent effective, but it did prevent most of the squish.
The Norwegian potato sausages:
Our first spiral (I believe this one is the longaniza, a delicious, vinegar-y breakfast sausage) drew oohs and aahs. If you look closely, you can see the squishage coming up over the plate in the stuffer (this was pre-Dominick’s bag).
The Coco Family Sausage in link form:
I “dried” the sausage in the refrigerator for two days before bagging and freezing it. A refrigerator only 1/4 full at this point with the meat-fruits of our labor:
All in all, the sausage-making party was a smashing success. I made a huge batch of cheese grits (using a white chive-cheddar that was horrible on its own, but quite tasty in the grits), a big salad and pan-grilled batches of all four sausages for dinner. I don’t have a “favorite” from the group because all were so different (or familiar) and tasty in their own right.
I did make wontons with some of the leftover Asian sausage mix (there’s about 1 or 2 cups of the mix leftover in each batch b/c the stuffer doesn’t push out every last bit).
A Cantonese friend showed me how to make easy wontons for soup on a stopover in Lawrence, KS, during the book tour, and I still can’t believe how simple they are to make. This style of dumpling is now officially on my “why buy frozen when you can make ‘em better yourself?” list. They’re not as hard to make as you’d think, and the results are infinitely more delicious than the frozen. Now, if I could only master the art of soup dumplings….
It's hard to figure out a good end to a post like this, but I thought I might wrap this up with a list of things I'd do differently for the next sausage party.
1. Make fewer types of sausage. Although it was nice to have a 'heritage' sausage party, cleaning The Beast between batches proved to be exhausting, and my hands are still chapped. I might do two different recipes, but not four.
2. Wear hairnets or hats. (I won’t go into the details.)
3. Only make sausage on cold-cold days if you have a small, crappy refrigerator. I, too, have read all of the warnings in “Charcuterie” about keeping the meat cold to keep the fat from smearing. But a crappy rental apartment refrigerator doesn’t have room for 40 lbs. of ground meat in various stages of sausage-making. We kept everything outside--in a cooler or covered in stainless steel bowls--and it all stayed ice-cold (to the point that our hands went numb when mixing or loading the meat).
4. Be brave. Mix in more pork fat nubbins.
5. ONLY EVER buy pre-tubed casings, no matter what the price.
6. Make friends with someone who knows how and has room to dry/age sausage.
7. Stock up on Zantac for the vegetarian who insists on eating sausage. (Seriously…she ate sausage. My kind of vegetarian.)
8. Don’t let the photographer drink too much. We have 100 pictures of mixing the first batch of sausage, but none of us at the end of the night actually eating the sausage.
9. Invest in a vaccu-sealer. Sucking the air out of 30 Ziploc bags isn’t fun.
10. Don’t eat homemade sausage at every meal for three days straight, no matter how delicious it is.
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