Me And My Sausage – a love story

Santa really delivered this year – I’ve always wanted to make sausages, well ever since I watched Kel on Kath & Kim trying to create the perfect wedding snag.

I began my smallgood experience by searching a heap of sausage making websites, set up, I assume, by nutters in lederhosen with no sex life. I quickly decided to start my journey by whipping up the classic Italian sausage – a spicy little number I had all the ingredients for.

The recipe called for 1kg of minced pork (nice fatty pork), 1 tablespoon each of salt, ground fennel seed, minced garlic, sugar, ground black pepper and 3 tablespoons of red wine and 1 1/2 tablespoons of paprika. Mix well and leave overnight, then pipe into lamb’s intestines and eat  🙂

By the time we were eating the moist little darlings, however, I was thinking if I was to sell them I’d have to charge about $200 a snag. This would be to cover my wages for the two hours it took to mince the pork shoulder and to replace the kitchen bench-top, which now has some impressive indentations due to the mincer being clamped tightly to it.

Can’t do much about the bench now, but I realized this afternoon, while making up a batch of Asian sausages, I mustn’t have had the mincer together tight enough, because the same amount of pork took only 5 minutes to mince.

And the flavour!! I’ve read on various sausage making websites there’s nothing quite like a home-made snag. And it’s true. I don’t know whether it’s all in my head because I put the hard yards in but the taste is unbelievably better: the meat is unbelievably melt in your mouth. On the whole, a huge success and am now insisting the kids call me “Dad, Purveyor of Fine Meats”. And Tracey is singing my praises around the house (or least talking them).

Only thing I’d do differently next time I make the Italian sausages is halve the amount of black pepper, although the more we eat the less inclined I am to change anything. Except for wrecking the kitchen bench – that I would change for sure.