Ethical Meat for Making Your Own Home-Made Sausages

Ethically reared, premium quality meat with fat is the starting point for creating your own home-made delicious and gristle-free sausage and how your meat is reared really does matter for both taste and importance of caring how animals reared for meat are kept!

Ethical Meat Pigs and Hens

Traditional Ethical Farming Methods place less stress on livestock which results in better quality meat.

Pigs in particular are intelligent creatures that would naturally inhabit the woodland floor, scavenging in their social groups all day to find enough sustenance for survival and breeding. They lay down fat to keep warm against the cold and need cool damp or watery wallows and shade in hot weather to keep cool.

This is sadly not how the vast majority of pork available in the shops/supermarkets is reared; breeds of pig created to grow fast in mainly artificial conditions and to be as lean as possible, sometimes kept indoors and on no bedding with slatted floors suspended over lagoons of the animals own effluent.

They are kept in confined and restricted conditions, often in darkness or artificial light without stimulus for an intelligent animal and without any access to truly ‘natural’ behaviours – it is no wonder they bite each others tails off and become aggressive and stressed!

Rare and Traditional Pig Breeds

Rare or traditional breed pigs kept as close to ‘naturally’ as possible are very different. Breeds like the British Saddleback, Gloucester Old Spot, Oxford and Sandy, Large Black, Berkshire…….plenty more, having experienced very little ‘commercially improved breeding’ cope well in ‘natural’ conditions where they please themselves about being indoors or foraging outdoors in the soil for tasty treats. These traditional breeds are fatter, more bristly and better equipped for a ‘natural life’.

Smallholder and Small Scale Producers of Ethical Meat

There are small-scale specialist breeders of ethical meat all across the country who have passion for their pigs and will be happy (by appointment!) to show you in person how their pigs for meat are kept but expect this pork to be substantially more costly than the lesser alternative. There are also small family butchers who deal with local suppliers, farm shops, farmers markets, specialist internet suppliers….

Ask Questions!

You need to ask searching questions of your meat supplier about what breed the pork is? i.e. traditional old breed or modern high production pink pig? The way that pig has lived and died really matters to taste.

Stress at the point of slaughter infects your meat with unnecessary and undesirable stress-induced chemical rushes so degrading the quality that stress free slaughter provides. It’s not just kind to the animal, it’s better for you.

Home Sausage Making

Home-Made Sausage Ingredients: Meat, Fat & Rusk (Fillers)

Home-Made Sausage Ingredients: Meat, Fat & Rusk (Fillers)

The three main ingredients of a sausage are meat, fat and a filler. In this article we discuss the importance of quality ingredients and how perceived expensive ingredients need not mean an expensive sausage. However, quality home-made sausages will...
Home Made Sausage Ingredients: Liquids, Flavourings, Casings (skins) etc.

Home Made Sausage Ingredients: Liquids, Flavourings, Casings (skins) etc.

Beyond meat, fat and rusk you will need to ensure your home-made sausage is moist and flavoursome. There's a choice of casing, as the skins are called, wet or dry and from different animal sources. This article follows on from Home-Made Sausage Ingredients:...
Home-Made Sausage - Equipment, Processing & Cooking

Home-Made Sausage - Equipment, Processing & Cooking

You don't need lots of expensive equipment to make your own sausages as we explain, however, you do need to cook them properly to really appreciate the flavour and quality you've imparted. This article follows on from Home-Made Sausage Ingredients: Liquids,...
Raising Your Own Pigs for Sausage Making

Raising Your Own Pigs for Sausage Making

To be absolutely certain that your pork has been ethically produced to a high standard, you really can't beat raising a couple of pigs yourself if you have the land. If you are lucky enough to have land of your own then rearing a couple of...

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