How the Sausage Gets Made
Literally!
A few weeks ago, Hunter came home from an unsupervised Costco run and cheerfully informed me he had spent a cool $700 at everyone’s favorite bulk emporium. How, you may ask, does a household of just two people store, let alone consume, that much food? Besides “a chest freezer and a dream,” the answer is “make 25 pounds of sausage and live off it for the rest of the year.”
The Costco run was not exclusively for sausage supplies (there was also a fire extinguisher and a quantity of cod fit for Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), nor were all the materials acquired at Costco. The fatback came from Peads & Barnetts, the same lovely folks who supply the pig for Hunter’s annual birthday roast; the grinder is a new toy Hunter acquired when I refused to let him put it on our wedding registry; the casings have been taking up space in the fridge since the last time Hunter did this. But if you need 15 pounds of pork shoulder and 10 pounds of belly to turn into meat sludge, there’s no better place to go.
I helped with elements of the process — mainly the stuffing, which is very much a two-person job even with the help of automation, and label writing, which required penmanship more legible and hands less meat-greased than Hunter’s. Mostly, though, I just observed the making of a food product that is not associated with home cooking for good reason, but feels miraculous when you acquire the specialized equipment to manage it anyway. It reminds me of ice cream making in that way.
Hunter ran most of the mixture through the grinder twice, apart from one blend that was meant to have a looser, grainier feel. Then it was time for seasoning.
Hunter had previously gotten a bag of pre-peeled garlic cloves to make the industrial quantity of purée you can see in the back. They are not to be confused with the dreaded jarlic, which is pre-minced and prone to bitterness, and a lifesaving shortcut when making toum or garlic confit.
There were four varieties on the sausage agenda: British-style bangers, flavored with oats, beer, herbs (thyme and sage) and warm spices like nutmeg; Chicago-style Italian, which is heavier on the fennel and lighter on the spice than the traditional mix; loukaniko, a Greek sausage flavored with orange zest and oregano (Hunter also used red wine) and the aforementioned rougher mix; and Toulouse, a garlic-forward flavor profile Hunter wanted for another big cooking project that will likely be the subject of my next email.
These blends are then fed into an extruder, which stuffs the casing in an action that looks distinctly…scatological. Hunter opted for natural casing made of sheep intestines, which you’re never quite able to forget were the original condoms.
That leaves you with a perfect, uninterrupted coil we learned the hard way should be tied off into links before you wander off to enjoy a multi-hour lunch with family. Learn from our mistakes! But also, look at that beautiful spiral:
After an overnight cure in our comically overstuffed refrigerator, the sausage mostly lives in the garage freezer now. It’s a lot of upfront work, but for a few hours of weekend labor, you get an instant building block for quick and easy weeknight meals like the creamy pasta pictured below. There’s also summer grilling on the horizon soon, but without being too gender normative about it, that’s Hunter’s job.
