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: Meat, Fat & Rusk
Sausage Ingredients: Liquids
If you are using very moist ingredients like fruit, vegetables, fresh herbs etc. then additional liquid will not be required but, if you are not, adding moisture to your mixture is critical.
Too little liquid and your sausages shrivel and are dry and unappetizing but too much and you’ll experience a whole range of resultant symptoms including skins splitting and sausages exploding during cooking due to trapped steam build-up within the sausage!
Your end mixture should be sticky and moist but hold together and not drip from your fingers when held up!
Sausage Ingredients: Individual Flavourings & Added Ingredients
For the vegetable gardener there is nothing better to add to your sausages than your own garden-grown organic vegetables, always enhanced of course by the inclusion of garden herbs. Vegetables with strong flavours such as onions, leeks and garlic are always firm favourites.
Don’t overlook the qualities of peppers, chillies, tomatoes, squashes and almost any vegetable, including roots, that have been oven roasted in a delicious basting of olive oil and other flavourings to your tastes.
A yummy and secretly a very sneaky way of getting those 5 vegetables per day into what appears a meaty sausage that will be a favourite with children!
Of course there are many fruits that blend and compliment meats within a sausage; Let your imagination run wild and your taste buds become excited by the possibilities.
Providing you follow the principles of Meat plus Fat, Rusk (or filler of your choosing), Moisture (either choose moist flavoursome tasty ingredients or add liquid) Plus your additional flavour ingredients and seasonings, anything goes!
Sausage skins or casings
‘Wet’ Sausage Casings
Natural ‘Wet Salted Casings’ are called Hog Casings and are from hog (that’s pig), sheep or ox (that’s beef/bovine) dependant on size of sausage needed. They are animal gut that has been cleaned and sterilized to destroy harmful germs and packed into salt to give a refrigerated shelf life of around 3 to 4 months. They need a minimum of 2 hours soaking in cold water prior to using.
‘Dry’ Sausage Casings
Dry casings are simpler to handle and come on an easy load dispenser so they slip readily onto the sausage nozzle. Casings or Skins can be purchased from your local butcher, delicatessens or very easily delivered in the post to your home address when ordered from specialist supply sites on the Internet.
Read Home-Made Sausages: Equipment, Processing & Cooking next