first venture into sausage making

 With another frozen leg of venison to process I finally decided to go ahead and treat myself to the KitchenAid meat grinder attachment - and I am loving it! Over the past couple years even tho our freezers are full of our homegrown meat we still buy at the store; tho almost always either ground or sausage... I think I noticed a need here! This first time I made about 6 pounds of sausage using two recipes, one from the book Home Sausage Making and one from the internet using maple syrup.

A few tips I learned while using the grinder, from the book and from google:
- Only process COLD meat and fat, stuff it in the freezer for 30-60 minutes before grinding, including in between grinds. This prevents the meat from turning grey (never happened to me, only read about it).
- Try and remove as much of the muscle sheaths as possible, those white fibrous membranes, as they will get stuck in and behind the grinder disk. If the meat "worms" stop coming out evenly, stop the grinder and clean the disk.
- With this grinder, grind meat and fat separately, then mix together. I grind everything once with the coarse disk straight into the mixing bowl, add the herbs and spices, and then use the flat paddle under the mixer to mix it all together which it did real nicely. Then I put everything thru the grinder's small disk (see pic) and it looks just like the hamburger meat from the store!

 Unfortunately, even tho I love the grinder attachment I do not like the sausage stuffer part of it. I googled my experience and found that screw grinders are not really meant to stuff, the rotating action of the screw takes way longer to get the meat thru and I found it comes out pretty much as pate. I personally like coarse texture sausage better than fine (bratwurst compared to hot dogs) so I do not think I will use that again. I did find mention, from a commercial chef who has used this same KitchenAid and grinder combination as I now have with pleasure for years, to use a cake decorating bag instead. Next time I'll mcgyver one with the sausage stuffer funnel at the end (you need some length for the all rolled up entrails) and see if that works any better!

My husband and son loved the sausages, we tried the regular ones first, tho both my hubbie and I would like a coarser texture. I also found recipes for poultry and already look forward to make some goose sausage!