Sausages round 1, Gravlax round 2

Finally my grinder and stuffer arrived and so yesterday night Steve, my partner in meat curing crime and I, did our first round of sausages. It was awesome. It also happened that my second batch of gravlax was also ready yesterday so this will be a double post of sorts. On to the info.



Fresh Garlic Sausage

Since this was our first batch we decided to go very simple. Pork shoulder, salt, pepper, fresh garlic, some red pepper flakes and red wine. We followed the ammounts in Ruhlmans book and decided to use collagen casings on this batch. Everything went fine except we did not get the meat cold enough and we had some smearing but that is why we are doing sausages before we try other stuff. At this point we just want to learn as much as possible. With everything ground we tranfered the meat to the new stuffer.
Here is Steve with our new tool.



Having never used another stuffer before I had no idea what to expect. I have to say that this beast rocked my socks off. We had a few tears as we got the hang of stuffing the casings but overall things went very well. Steve manned the crank and I tied them off. Before we knew if we had stuffed all the meat and were ready to taste.
Here is the final result, 5 lbs of amazingly simple, yet super tasty porky goodness.



It tastes awesome! The garlic and wine melded together perfectly and the meat was tender and juicy but not greasy. We took a few over to a friends house to show off our creation. They were recieved very well and the eight links we brought vanished with the smaking of lips.So that means tonight we have to do a sweet Italian batch right?
Now what to do next. I know, pose for a quick photo op before breaking into the just cured salmon.




Did I mention that I love working right next to an awesome fish house? I do and it is one of the best perks of my job. This is a one and a half lb Sockeye fillet that was cured using salt, sugar, dill and lemon zest. It was left on the cure for two days and it tastes like heaven. This is so easy to do that if you love fish there is no reason not to make some for yourself this weekend.

Sorry for the lack of beer posts. I am waiting for ingredients to get here but I should have posts on the next batches within a week. I will be doing a Arrogant Bastard clone and a Dogfish Head 60 min clone.
Thanks for reading! Cheers!