One of the best things I have done lately is giving myself ‘Charcuterie’ by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn for Christmas. Ever since then I’ve had sausage on the brain. The book guides you through all the steps with clear instructions and drawings, so making your own sausage seems like a cinch!

Dry sausages, such as the French saucisson sec and the Spanish Chorizo, are a bit more difficult to make because you need starter cultures for them, which are very hard to come by in the Netherlands*. But in a few weeks time my batch will arrive via some useful contacts in Britain, and I will conquer the dry sausage in no time at all! For this experiment I started with a fairly easy recipe for Italian sausage, which turned out to be even easier to make than I anticipated.

But before I guide you through the process, there’s some equipment which is indispensible for sausagemaking.

First of all, you’ll need a meat-grinder. These range from the very cheap to the very expensive, and while I am usually all for cheap kitchen equipment, in this case it is very worthwhile to invest in a higher price category. The cheap ones usually heat up the meat while grinding (and you really don’t want that), make a lot of noise and have plastic attachments which will break more easily. If you have a food processor such as a Kenwood or a KitchenAid, meat-grinder attachments are available for a pretty reasonable price.

Precision scales are very useful for sausagemaking (and cooking in general). Most ordinairy scales are usually a couple of grams off, and measurements are crucial in this process. Adding too much or too little salt to your mixture can make a big difference! I bought mine for about 20 euros on the internet, and it works great.

And of course you can’t make sausage without the casing! I used hog casings for the Italian sausage, which I ordered from www.sausagemaking.org, but most butchers sell them as well (again, it can’t hurt to befriend a butcher!). The casings will keep for a long time in your refrigerator, so it’s no problem if you dont use all the casing at once.

Now we come to the actual sausagemaking. I used the following ingredients:

• About 4 meters  (13 feet) of hog casings, soaked in cold water for about half an hour.
• 2 kilos of pork shoulders, cubed
• 500 grams of pork back fat. cubed**
• 12 grams of Spanish sweet smoked paprika (pimenton)
• 24 grams of salt
• 16 grams of freshly grinded black pepper
• 12 grams of finely chopped garlic
• 16 grams plain sugar
• 200 ml. red wine vinegar
• 200 ml. ice water

Make sure the meat and fat are as cold as possible before you use them: only take them out of the refrigerator moments before you will use them.

When you soak the hog casings they will look pretty disgusting:

Now ignore everything that comes up in your mind when you look at this, and instead focus on mixing the meat, fat and dry ingredients together.

Now, use your meat grinder (which has to be very thoroughly cleaned before you use it, to avoid cross-contamination) to grind this mixture very finely. The resulting mixture will look something like this:

Now it is time to mix the wet ingredients (the red wine vinegar and ice water) together with the ground pork. Make sure it is a smooth mixture. Now we come to the best part: the stuffing of the cases! For this you will need the sausage filler accessory, which looks like a large tube. Take the soaked intestine and roll it up the tube until you have a couple of centimeters overhang at the end. Now, in an ideal world there’s two of you in this step of the process: a person to put the meat through the tube and a person who holds the casing and twists it every once in a while to create the links of the sausage. Make sure the meat is evenly distributed through the tube. If you want fatter sausages, apply some pressure when the meat comes out of the tube: the casing will fill up more. The process will look something like this:

Just keep going until you reach the end of the casing, or you run out of meat. Then you’ll end up with a big pile of sausages:

Just use what you need for dinner (fry them for about 10-15 minutes, until cooked through) and freeze the rest!

So that’s how easy it is to make your own sausage. I can recommend buying Charcuterie and trying the recipes yourself: there’s something in there for every sausage lover. The great advantage of creating your own sausages is that it is cheaper than storebought, easy to make organic sausages, and you know exactly what has been put in there!

* If you live in UK, the great website www.sausagemaking.org ships starter cultures to you! Sausage afficionados in the US needn’t worry as well, www.butcher-packer.com has them as well. If you live outside these countries, you either have to befriend a butcher who cures his own sausage and is willing to order them for you, or make some friends who are willing to bring the cultures with them from the USA or UK.

** Always use enough fat for you sausage! Trust me, it makes all the difference in taste and texture.