Sausage making

I'm tired of eating pink slime pleb tier "sausages" from the butchers and I've been thinking about getting a sausage making kit from amazon to make my own sausages. Does anyone here make their own sausages? Is it difficult?

or go to a non-shitcunt butcher, problem solved

I went to some numale "gourmet" butchers, and they sell "gourmet" sausages for triple the price. No fukn thank you. I'd much rather make my own.

i do, and no it's not difficult. There is a time investment, prep, production, clean up. To me it hardly feels like work, generally make 20 lbs at a time.10lbs of my nonna's italian style, 5lbs of chorizo, and then experiment with the last 5 lbs and try out new recipes.

The most important thing is the meat to liquid to salt ratio. At first i followed Ruhlman's master ratio and the sausages were fucking salt pucks.

I took a local sausage making class and they suggested 5lbs of meat to 1.5 tbsp of salt to 1/2 cup of liquid. I've used this for years now and it's worked well for me but adjust the salt according to your taste.

Invest in a stuffer, at first i just used my grinder without the blade to stuff and it gave my sausages the texture of a hot dog, springy, very over worked.

It's a lot easier with 2 people, but is very doable alone. That being said it's a great social activity for a group of people, have some drinks let people season their own 5lbs and cook em up at the end.

Use real hog casings, make sure you soak them for 30+ mins and then rinse them 5+ times.

The key steps to the process are chop, marinate, grind, taste, stuff and hang.

Pork shoulder works best in my experience, at the end of the day you're not saving a ton of money on the process, but you're making a noticably supierior product and are in total control of the what goes into it if that matters to you.

For me it's a labor of love, not a cost saving measure. I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have, though i am far from a master by any stretch.

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What's your opinion of the kitchenaid sausage making attachments?
Also, what's the best beef and lamb cuts for sausage making?

i think the the kitchenaid is underpowered for grinding, model depending it's also very off balanced and awkward to work with for grinding meat. It can still acheive the task no doubt. However, if you're going to be making sausage semi regularly it's my opinion that you're better off putting money into a decent grinder and cheap mechanical stuffer as the process will be a lot faster and easier.

To be honest i haven't made beef or lamb sausage, i'm just now doing the initial research for a making a merguez sausage. Convential wisdom says 70:30 meat to fat for making any kind of sausage.

unless there's a large, large amount of things you plan on doing with this and have someone to assist, it really is not worth the effort. do you have a decent sized family that will eat them regularly without having to freeze them to keep from going bad? do you host/go to enough dinner parties to the point you don't mind being known as 'that guy who makes sausages for every event'?

incoming spam of the sausage turkey i made for friendsgiving a few years ago. they were awesome, but not worth the hours of labor that went into them.

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