Sausage...and other fine meats...

Today our big project was getting the sausage done. We took this beautiful pan of wild hog chunks.....

And ground it into this....

We ground 10 pounds of the pork, and turned 3 pounds into breakfast sausage. Unless you are making links, breakfast sausage is the easiest sausage to make. It amazes me when I see the price in the grocery store! I didnt get any pictures of the process, not that there's much to see. We had a friend stop by to visit while we were grinding, I pulled out a couple of pounds, seasoned them, and wrapped them into 3 packages. Of course our guest got a pack of breakfast sausage.

Come to think of it, we frequently give door prizes here. If you show up on chicken butchering day, you might go home with a fine home-grown bird ready for the oven . . . But most of the time I guess the door prize is something you step in while you visit.

But I digress...

The remaining ground pork had the honor of becoming perhaps the world's finest East Texas Smoked Italian Sausage. Wrap your brain around that for a minute. This is east Texas wild hog, seasoned with the finest Italian ingredients to make a beautiful sweet Italian sausage....and then smoked over pecan wood. The process is pretty simple and straight-forward...the flavor is out of this world. Here is the process:

First, you give birth to an adorable child that loves to help in the kitchen. This first step is very important because despite what others will tell you, it is IMPOSSIBLE to stuff sausage in the home kitchen with only 2 hands.

Second, buy some casings. I use hog casings mostly, because that is the size we use for smoking most frequently (Italian sausage, smoked country sausage, keilbasa, etc). Sheep casings are a great size for breakfast links...but we just make sausage patties rather than going through the extra work.

These are packed in salt. You only want to pull out what you need; it makes it go much longer. 5# of ground meat makes about 5 feet of sausage. This of course depends on the type (are you going to tie each piece into a link?)....but typically we don't tie links, we twist them and smoke them. That way you only use excess casings for a knot at each end.

The casings have to be rinsed very well in cool water. Once rinsed, they need to sit in warm water for about 30 minutes (I change the water every 10 mins or so to keep it warm and to wash more salt away).

Now for the fun part! Stuffing that luscious seasoned meat into the casings to create the finest sausage on the planet.