We won't bore you with the history of sausage making or tell you what kinds of different sausages there are. We just want to tell you it's not as hard as you might think. Here is how to make sausage.

The best cut of meat to use for sausage is pork shoulder (cuts of meat). It usually goes on sale in January/February. A 17 lb shoulder will yield approximately 15 lbs of meat, plus the other white meat. Yes fat. You've got to cut off as much of the fat from the shoulder as you can, and use it. If you don't use all the fat, your sausage may turn out dry. In fact the shoulder may not have as much fat as you would like. In that case, try adding a pound of bacon to the mix. If you look at bacon, it's usually made up mostly of fat, but with extra flavour. Now no one ever said to make a steady diet of sausage, so if you're concerned about your fat intake, just don't eat it too often. But if you want delicious sausage, don't go too lean. Personally, we don't add any extra fat, but we do use as much fat as we can get from the shoulder. It's a personal decision on how much fat you like.
We use our KitchenAid (setup), with a meat grinder attachment to grind the meat coarsely. We grind it once with the coarse plates. This will gives us the texture of most store bought sausage. There may be professional machines out there to do this, but this is practical for us, after all, we had the machine, we just had to add the grinder/stuffer. It does what we want it to do, make sausage. We did start out with a hand grinder, but the sausage turned out so good, that there was no way we were going to do 3 shoulders in a day like we do now.
 We then mix up the seasoning and add to the meat. The next part is my favourite. We fry up a little (or a lot) to make sure the seasoning is just right. 

The next step is to add the stuffing attachment to the KitchenAid. We have had the hog casing soaking for an hour (to remove the salt it is packed in). The casing should be rinsed through. Just grab an end and put it up to the tap. Pour in a little cold water and slosh the water back and forth in the casing to rinse it out. Use a little vegetable oil on the stuffer to help with putting the casing on, and to make it easier for the casing to come off. Tie a knot on the end of the casing and prick it so there won't be any air bubbles. Now stuff away. When you reach a link length, you twirl the link a couple of times. Just remember to always twirl the next link the opposite way. As the links come off, the machine, lay the links down in a coil. When you reach the end of the casing, tie it into a knot. Now that you've got this huge rope of sausage, use a skewer to prick any air pockets. Now we usually place each coil on waxed paper and let rest overnight in the fridge. Some of the recipes will weep a bit. We don't bag the sausage yet, we just put the whole coil on a tray in the freezer as is. The next day the coil is frozen so it's now time to cut the sausage into the links. Put the links in freezer bags and enjoy the sausage months down the road. In fact every time you open the fridge for the next couple of days, you'll smell sausage. Now of course you could put baking soda in the fridge to get rid of that smell, but why would you if you are a real sausage lover?

KitchenAid Set Up I've had many questions about how to set up the KitchenAid for grinding and stuffing. Pictures tell it all. Remember to only have the speed set at 4. A higher speed only heats up the meat. Click on the thumbnails for a larger picture
	Grinding set up		Stuffing set up

Click to purchase
	This grinder attachment combined with the above funnels is all you need to turn your KitchenAid stand mixer into a sausage machine
	If you make a lot of sausage, or do a lot of grinding, this tray comes in handy

Check out our Sausage Making Store!!!
New!!! PLUS, now more sausage making cookbooks
 & products at our expanded E-Store