A Little Home Made Sausage Party!

The recent warm weather has inspired me to talk my friends into throwing a very large BBQ in a couple of weeks. The idea would be to have a more ambitious menu and drink list than any other BBQ that I have ever attended.

This got me to thinking about something I can do in addition to cooking copious amounts of food, something that might be a fun twist. I harkened back to a couple of episodes of Top Chef and couldn’t help but think of Tom Colichio sitting at the judges table, condemning cheftestants for not making their own sausage. I then thought to myself “I need to make my own sausage!”

Of course I had never made my own sausage before, nor did I have the proper equipment. I went to Ottomanelli’s with the idea of asking them what exactly I had to do to make some duck sausage. Unfortunately, my lack of a meat grinder made duck sausage impossibility. I then settled for venison cut with a little pork (for the fat) in a pork casing.

Once the meat was purchased I went home and thought about how I was going to season the sausage. I decided to try for a sweeter, richer profile with the venison using dried pitted prunes, Chinese five spice powder, juniper berries, port wine and toasted cocoa nibs to season the meat.

A little venison sausage (pre-casing) taste test.
Here it's served with some cherry-rhubarb chutney

After seasoning the meat, I quickly learned why people don’t make sausage at home very often…Getting the meat into the casings is a pain in the ass. Originally, on the recommendation of the Ottomanelli guys, I started using a funnel. However, the tip was not large enough and after 30 minutes of frantically using my fingers to force the meat through the funnel into the sausage casing and several broken casings later, I gave up. There had to be a better way. At this point I had two sausages and decided I would sleep on the project and finish the next day.

In the morning I awakened to the brilliant idea of using a pastry bag to get the meat into the casings. This did in fact work extremely well and I was able to finish the next ten or so sausages in rather minimal time.

The end result was pretty rich, but not too bad. I still think I can do better but I’m also starting to think that venison might just not be that great in sausage form. I do however have some good idea for future sausages. I’m thinking something along the lines of pork, ginger, scallion and Sriracha sausage; lamb, cherry, pine nuts and mint, and perhaps a pork apple cinnamon and maple sausage. Let’s see how many of these make it to the BBQ on the 17th.