Sausage making!

Finally, we had some rain today...;) so a good day to make a fresh batch of sausages.
You may wonder what the relevance is to this Blog: Well, I believe using good, local and seasonal produce is relevant to your environmental credentials. More importantly, if the raw ingredients are of an excellent quality then the end result is likely to be pretty good. You know where it comes from, how far it traveled, and what's in it.
What's in it is of course important when making a sausage: Many butchers (but not all!) will use any old scraps to put through the mincer, add some bought-in ready mixed sausage flavouring powder, add salt (a lot of it), add rusk (even more, to keep the ingredients costs down) and ram it through a machine using collagen casing, made out any unspeakable part of animals.

Well...not here!

Today's batch of sausages is made out of the following list of ingredients:

• Gloucester Old Spot free range minced pork from the Sudeley Estate, Winchcombe (100%)
• Onions from our own garden (7% of the meat weight)
• Sage and Rosemary from our own garden
• Black pepper
• Breadcrumbs (7% of the meat weight)
• Water (7% of the meat weight)
• Virgin rape seed oil
• Curing Salt (0.75% of the total weight)
• Natural hog casings

The process is as follows:

1. Chop the onions, sweat  in a little rape seed oil, add chopped herbs and spices, add salt, add the water, bring to the boil to dissolve the salt, cool.
2. Mix this with the minced pork and bread-crumps.
3. Put in the sausage making machine and press the sausages into the casings to make one VERY LONG SAUSAGE.
4. Make a string of little sausages by squeezing and twisting
5. Leave to dry in a cool airy place overnight

Ready!

Putting the minced pork mixture in the sausage making machine

Turning out one large sausage, using a hand-cranked machine

Dividing the large sausage into individual linked sausages