DIY -- sausage

No, I'm not going to tell you to go out and buy a grinder with a sausage casing attachment.

What I want you to do is a price comparison. If it doesn't work out for you, ignore everything else in this post.

Check how much your store charges for extra lean ground beef, for ground lamb and ground turkey. Then compare to the same weight of American breakfast sausage, chorizo, bratwurst, merguez, Italian or Polish sausage, bologna (mortadella), and salami. And can you even get Rookworst in the U.S. without going to a fancy specialty shop?

In my case, which is kosher, the figures are, an average $14.50 a pound for the fancy sausages, compared to $6/lb  for turkey, $10/lb for lamb, and  $7.29/lb for beef. Bologna (mortadella) and salami are cheaper if you buy them because they are high-volume -- but they are also higher in fat than mine because I deliberately buy extra lean ground beef.

I have found recipes online for all of these (although the mortadella and salami are generic), and you can package them in plastic wrap and consolidate them in the fridge, then bake them or run them through a hot smoker, instead of using fussy sausage casings.

I was even able to fake Lebanon bologna, a product of the Amish around Lebanon PA. Some websites tell you to ferment it, but I've talked to the product specialist at Seltzer's where they still make it the old-fashioned way, and I think what he said is that fermentation is a chemical way of doing what happens when you cold smoke it for a few weeks.  If you can't cold-smoke, you can still get close to the flavor without the chemicals.

The downside? Your mortadella and Lebanon bologna will turn out stiff like meatloaf instead of flexible like what you buy at the deli counter, but that's because you used lean ground beef. You can use "regular" or get the meat cutters to give you some of their suet (you might get it free!) but you would need a grinder so you can stir it evenly throughout your product. The last thing most of us need in our diets is fat. I'm down with flavored meatloaf. YMMV.

Now, if SHTF you won't have plastic wrap or aluminum foil that you dare use with raw meat but you will have the intestines of the animal for natural casing, you just have to wash them carefully. Sausage is only useful so that the stray scraps of butchering don't go to waste.  You could always cook the scraps down and cook cornmeal in the broth. It's another Amish product called scrapple.

So save the equipment money and DIY your sausage, and if S does not HTF you'll spend less on flavored scrap meat.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved