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| Keen Helper No. 1 |
A few years ago, I subjected Mr Carl to a Punch and Judy show at a local community event. If you haven't seen a Punch and Judy show, part of the story revolves around Mr Punch having to protect a bunch of sausages from a crocodile. Much of what was said in the show was incomprehensible gibberish (part of the delight of the show I might add), however one word was clear, swausages! Ever since then, it has been swausages for us!
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| Stealth shot of the cooks |
Anyway, swausages were the inspiration for my next cooking adventure. Actually, the inspiration was a charcuterie book I received as a gift (thanks Leia) and Brett wanting to try out some of the attachments on his wedding present, a Kenwood! After a bit of discussion we decided to try out three different recipes, Toulouse sausages, Hungarian sausages and beef sausages.
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| I don't remember this from the video |
At this point in time I feel the need to point out that neither Brett or I had ever made sausages before. But after reading the instructions in the recipe book and watching a You Tube video or two, we figured we were ready to go! Three different types of sausages in one afternoon, what could go wrong?
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| Hard at work |
In our defence, we did organise ourselves, with all the ingredients collected before we started. We also had the process pretty much sorted, specifically:
1. mince meat
2. mix meat with spices
3. stuff sausages
4. cook sausages
5. eat sausages
Simple!
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| Kinda right? |
Initially we attempted to mince the meat the size we wanted for the sausage meat, however this resulted in a certain amount of "smearing" rather than mincing. We then revised our strategy, starting with the largest size mincer and then mincing the meat a second time to achieve the size we wanted. As per the instructions, we were careful to keep the mince as cold as possible, mincing the meat into a bowl sitting in ice water. Just a note to other potential sausage makers, do not overfill the ice water bowl then press the other bowl into it. Not unless you are really enthusiastic about washing your floor!
Once we had competed the mincing and cleaned up all the spilt ice water, we proceeded to step 2, the mixing of the sausage mix. This was probably the easiest part of the whole process, and after some measuring and mixing we soon had three bowls of sausage mix sitting in the fridge.
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| A productive afternoon |
The next step proved to be the most difficult. At the recommendation of Brett's butcher, we had opted for synthetic casing for thin sausages. As it turns out, it may have been better had we opted for thicker sausages as we very quickly found that the Kenwood's sausage stuffer seemed to struggle stuffing thin sausages.
We still haven't exactly figured out what the difficulty was, it was either that we needed to mince the meat finer, or the kenwoods thin sausage stuffer suffered from poor design (I'm actually opting for the later), however we were in a bit of a bad situation, having three bowls of sausage mix and no way of stuffing it in the casing!
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| Taste testers preparing for the blind taste test! |
Brett and I pulled out all our engineering knowledge (Brett, being an actual engineer, rocked at this) to try and get the thin casing on the thicker sausage stuffer. Unfortunately this resulted in a slightly cracked sausage stuffer, but we did manage to get the skins onto it, or at least some of the skins. Wetting the skins also seemed to help though the downside of this was that it made the skins more fragile and they kept bursting.
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| The Master Chef! |
Eventually we managed to get all the skins either stuffed or broken, with the majority falling into the "stuffed" category. Left over mix was formed into patties and then we moved onto step 4. Theoretically we were meant to let the sausages rest, but after all that effort we definitely thought we ought to taste test a few!
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| Sheer Awesomeness! |
Brett donned an apron and soon there were the happy sounds of sausages and patties sizzling away. In our rush to taste test, a few of the skins split in the pan, but that didn't stop the delicious devouring of our home made sausages. The verdict? Awesome! Swausages Rock!
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| Keen Helpers 1 and 2 approve! |
