[cloddopper]

I've been making sausage today .




 Initially I had a hell of a job for the mincer kept gumming up and the pork was turned to mush instead of being chopped mince.




After taking the darn thing apart for the umpteenth time , finding that the plate and cutter were bound solid with sinew and marbling I was ready for chucking the towel in and making hand chopped salami instead.
 After washing out each strip down and using a wooden BBQ stick to clean out the plat holes I finally laid everything out in order to try and understand what was happening , for last time I used it it was the bee's knees .




 Then the penny dropped ..see if you can see what it is in the picture taken after I'd minced the 4.4 Kg of pork ?



 Spotted it yet ?


 

 That little spring makes such a difference ..it keeps the cutter flat on the plate & helps give a clean cut . I didn't realise it was missing when I assembled it to start the mincing up .
 I later found out Munchkin had been in the cupboard , moved & dropped the little open cardboard box of parts on the bed and it must have fallen out . It took me a good hour to empty & search the cupboard and the bedroom .. till I found the spring on the carpet halfway up under the bed ..



One last thing .  Due to having had several bad food poisoning events in my life ( whilst out and about in our HMF ) I have a rather high level of champlybacter bacteria ( SP ?) in me and it's easily tripped into disaster . Knowing this I have to be scrupulous in hygiene . That cutter pressure spring was chock-a-bloc with sinew & marbling as you can see in the picture the only way to open the ends of the spring is to press a cooking knife in the coil and when it opens up enough use a pointed BBQ stick to remove the offending flesh etc.





 Final shot today I made 76 decent sized thick sausages out of the mixture .
 Currently they have been cut from the links  and laid out individually on trays and put in the freezer, tomorrow I will  be bringing them inside and heat seal vac packing them in packs of three . 

 That should last us abut six months if the electrical power to the property supply stays settled.

 Before making the sausages each batch of sausage meat was sampled , the resulting patty fried in the frying pan ..Hardly any fat came out and they tasted fantastic .

 For a cost of about £22 in total ,  that's not a bad price for 6 months of decent sausages.

[devonlady]

I'll be round for breakfast on Sunday. I'll bring the home- cured bacon. Now, who'll bring the eggs?

[Bionic]

Those look good sausages 

[cloddopper]

They are not quite as nice as we'd hoped . I put the mince into two equal weight batches and added 1/2 teaspoon of ground up lavender to the regular sage & thyme , nutmeg , salt & black pepper seasoning . The lavender is not to my mind an enhancer
 
One other thing in the pictures is you can see there is hardly any fat ( as I'm on a low fat life due to blood clots) .  That meant the sausages had lost a lot of flavour .

Fortunately I rendered the crackling down and have 1/2 a mug of fine pork fat to smear the frying pan with for future meals .

Having laid the sausages out in separate units on trays last night and freezing them , I've put them in heat sealed vac pack bags to night and ended up with 22 meals worth for the three of us.