Making our own sausage mix

Our butcher is coming next week and he will do two beasts this time, so we are getting organised. I've written a lot about butchering over the years and this will be our eighth and ninth animals killed on our own property. On that last day, they will know no fear, maybe some curiosity (who is that strange man pointing that stick at me?) and it will be a quick end to a fairly peaceful and comfortable life. Its not such an easy day for us, it can be quite emotional seeing the death of an animal that you've raised from a young age, not to mention physically draining putting all the meat away, but its all worth it to get the best quality meat possible.

eight acres: bush butcher guide to home cured meats and sausage making review and sausage recipe for homekill butcher

One of the things we are doing this year is make our own sausage mix. If you want to know more about home butchering in general, here are all the posts I've written in the past:

Homekill meat - some tips for beginners

Home butcher vs meatworks

Homekill butchering

Homekill butcher day - tips and tricks

Homekill beef - two small beef cattle for added co...

Getting the best from homekill meat

Organic sausage mix for home butchering

Homekill beef - is it worth it?

Wet aging our beef (and BBQ show and tell)

We are gradually getting more adventurous with our own recipes. Even though the butcher offers marinade for the BBQ steak, stuffing for the rolled roast, flavoured brine for the corned meat, and pre-made sausage mix, we usually refuse the marinade and brine, and provide our own stuffing and sausage mix (and lately sausage skins as well). The last few years I have bought an organic sausage mix. The main reason was to avoid MSG in the standard mixes. If you look at the ingredients in the standard butcher sausage mixes, they are generally pretty cheap and nasty. The organic one was nice, but I couldn't get hold of the company to order it again this year, so we decided to try making our own.

Several years ago we bought an awesome little book called "The Bush Butcher's Guide to Home Cured Meats and Sausage Making" by Michael Gale. This book contains 64 sausage recipes, as well as instructions for smoking meat and making bacon. We did try a couple of the recipes and made our own sausages using the sausage attachment for our auger juicer/mincer, but they were a bit of a disaster due entirely to our own fault - over stuffing the sausages, although they tasted great. We never came back to it because we always had so many sausages from the butcher! I never wanted to bother the butcher with weird sausage requests, but then I realised that we can make up premixes ourselves, so it won't be any different to the bought ones.

But I didn't want to make up a huge amount of sausages and find that we didn't like them (that happened a few times already and we had to feed them to the dogs/give them away/throw them out, which was a massive waste and disappointment). So I bought some mince (gasp!) and made up mini batch of "sausages" without skins so that we could test each recipe. Then when we knew which ones that we liked, I bought bulk herbs from the supermarket and made up premixes for 10kg of sausages each. It was a lot of fun to try different herbs that I don't usually buy and make some very tasty sausage rissoles - things like mace and caraway seeds and nutmeg!

I contacted Michael Gale and you can still buy his book through Gumtree and he said I was welcome to share a recipe with you, so here is one of our favourites so far. You can use this for sausages or meatballs (I later make the chicken bratwurst as meatballs with chicken mince and they were yummy too - I put in an egg instead of breadcrumbs).

Beef Sausage #1 - to make 1kg

800g lean beef

200g beef fat

3/4 cup cold water

3/4 cup breadcrumbs - optional, but some kind of filler does help to disperse the ingredients through a large amount of mine, so I used tapioca flour

1 tablespoon dried parsley

1 tablespoon onion flakes (or powder)

1 1/2 tablespoon salt (optional, but does really help bring out the flavour)

1 1/2 teaspoon garlic granules (or powder)

1/2 teaspoon ground white pepper

extra cold water as necessary

Have you made your own sausages? Any favourite recipes? Any tips for homekill butchering?

Farm update - August 2017

Its been cold this month, and very nice to have the fire going every night. Here's a photo of my boy in his cape, great for late night woofing at things. Most of July we were either preparing for the butcher to come or putting meat away. Its always a big job, but its only once a year, and its all done now. My lovely neighbour came over to help, so it was fun to have the company and work together. Taz was a champion once again as she helped us to move cattle in the yards ready to load for the market. Gus is not at that level yet and had to stay home (he cries when he gets left behind, but he just gets in the way and scatters the cattle). We have had a few sprinkles of rain here and there, but also plenty of cold nights, so the grass is mostly dead and dry, waiting for the warmer weather to revive our summer-active pasture. Gus in his cape Taz after she helped to move cattle Food and cooking It was all about beef in July and we are v...

Cooking and eating beans

When I was growing up, my family never ate many dried beans, they just weren't something that was used much in NZ cuisine. If I did eat beans, it was always from a can (and most likely baked beans). And until recently I was still using beans from a can, but it can be difficult to get organic beans, and to find cans not lined with BPA. Then I had an opportunity to buy some organic dry goods in bulk, so I bought 5kg of kidney beans, 5kg of adzuki beans and 5kg of chickpea (garbanzo beans). I know, that is a lot of beans. And then I didn't really know what to do with them! Not just what dishes to put them in, but how to prepare them, I just didn't know what method to use. So I decided it was time to learn how to use all these beans that I bought, here's what I found out. I started with an excellent ebook called The Everything Beans Book , from Katie at Kitchen Stewardship, which has lots of bean recipes, but more importantly, an explanation of h...

Guest post: Is there a place for power tools in the garden?

One of my regular readers and commenters offered to write a guest post about a horticulture course, its quite a funny read, with some serious insights into our technology obsession. If you'd like to submit a guest post, email me at eight.acres.liz {at} gmail.com. While I am always happy to share links back to your blog or website, this contributor preferred to remain anonymous. I hope you enjoy their story.... -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- Just a few days ago our daily horticulture classes were interrupted by an invitation to review some new gardening gadgets. The idea was to open half a dozen of electric hand trimmers , test them and fill in some review about their goods and bads. As nothing is more dear to a student – even a “hort “ one - to escape routine and mess around till lunchtime, we opened the boxes and got down to business. What did we...

Eight Acres

Search This Blog