 Sausage is a mixture of meat and spices that can be used in patties, in bulk, or stuffed into casings. Sausage can be made from beef, veal, pork, lamb, poultry, venison, mousse, caribou, bear, fish, or any combination of these meats. Sausage can add variety to your family meals. It's an excellent source of high quality protein containing all the essential amino acids necessary for growth, maintenance, and repair of body tissue. Making sausage at home can be a great family project. You can create your own recipe, make a sausage that isn't readily available in the store, or even adjust recipes to suit your own taste. This module will guide you through the steps of making fresh sausage. I am Roxy Dinstall with the Cooperative Extension Service, University of Alaska Fairbanks. There's lots to do, so let's get started. Good sausage starts with quality ingredients. Meat is the main ingredient in sausage, so let's start there. You can't improve the flavor or the quality of meat by putting it in sausage. All flavors or germs in the raw meat will become part of the final product. Start with good quality meat that's been carefully handled to avoid bacterial growth. It should be wholesome and have the proper meat to fat ratio. If using frozen meat, be sure to thaw it in a refrigerator or in a package under cold running water. Commercial sausages contain from 30 to 40% fat. By preparing them at home, you control the amount of fat in the product. The fat to lean ratio contributes to the juiciness of the product. 10 to 20% fat is a good ratio. If the product is too lean, a dry, tasteless sausage may result. If you're using gain meat, such as the mousse that I have here, the meat is very lean, often less than 5% fat. If you're adding fat, use suet, back fat, or trimmings. Mousse fat may be used, but it often has a strong flavor. Mixing gain meat with domestic meat is another way to increase fat content and juiciness. A combination of pork, like I have here, which has a higher degree of natural fat, and gain meat, which is leaner, is a good example of this. Salt is used in sausages to enhance flavor. It is often used in dry-cure sausages as a preservative. In some types of sausages, it can be used as a binding agent. Now, canning or pickling salt, or kosher salt, should be used in making sausages. Table salt or iodized salt may have impurities that can add off flavors. Also note that granulated salt is heavier than kosher or flaked salt. This difference is enough to change the end taste of the product. If your recipe calls for granular salt, you'll want to use more kosher salt. Now, for herbs, spices, and peppers. Make sure your spices and herbs are fresh. Spices lose their flavor with longer storage. For best flavor, spices and herbs should be used before they're 18 months old. Taste them to make sure that the flavors are fresh and strong. Ice is needed to keep the ground meat cold while mixing. Additional ingredients may be used for flavor or for their ability to bind the ingredients together. These may include onions, cheese, eggs, protein powder, rice, flour, dried milk, celery, potatoes, and bread. To make sausage at home, you need paper towels and a hand washing soap. Some type of a sanitizing solution to keep your surfaces clean and safe. You'll need a scale and a grinder. With at least a 1 eighth inch grinding plate. Though you may choose to use a quarter inch grinding plate for the first grind and an eighth inch grinding plate for the second grind. You'll need cutting board and sharp knives. A mixing bowl to mix your sausage in. And, of course, measuring spoons. When your sausage is finished, you'll need casings to put it in along with a sausage stuffer. Or, if you leave it in bulk form, you'll need freezer bags to store your sausage. The two cardinal rules are to keep meat cold and clean in that order. Cool temperatures are essential to keep meat safe. For short-term storage, meat should be kept at temperatures colder than 40 degrees Fahrenheit. This will keep meat fresh for several days. Between 40 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature danger zone. This is the perfect breeding ground for bacteria and other microorganisms. For longer storage, keep meat below 0 degrees Fahrenheit for best quality. Clean and sanitary surfaces are also important when dealing with meat. This is particularly important with game meat where there's so much opportunity for contamination in the field. Clean all surfaces that will touch the meat. Hands, cutting boards, grinder plates, knives, and mixing bowls. Use the dilute solution of chlorine bleach. The proportion to use is one tablespoon of bleach to one gallon of water. For a smaller amount, like we are going to use in our sanitizing solution, we're using one cup of water and an eighth of a teaspoon of chlorine bleach. We're going to treat sausage making in two parts. The first will center on how to make bulk sausage, and the second using the casings to make leek sausages. When preparing bulk sausage, work with small quantities of meat. Refrigerate the rest for food safety. Make no more than five pounds at once. This is an easy amount to work with, and the danger of bacterial contamination increases with larger batches. It doesn't matter if you use a large meat grinder like this one, or a small household grinder, they work exactly the same. We're going to start with a quarter inch grinding plate, and we're going to keep the meat and fat very cold prior to grinding. Meat's easier to grind if it's frozen slightly. Cutting meat into long strips allows for easier grinding too. Occasionally, grind through a piece of fat to keep the fat-meat ratio correct. If you're using additional ingredients such as onions, breads, potatoes, or carrots, they can be ground at this time. After the meat is ground, grind some ice to keep the grinding plates clean and to keep the meat cold. Run a piece of bread or potato through the grinder last. This helps clear the grinding plates of fat and helps with the cleaning process. Now, let's get all of this meat ground up. Now that the meat's all ground up, we want to mix the spices and herbs for the recipe with ice water. The resulting slurry dissolves the spices for easier mixing. It also keeps the temperature of the meat down during the mixing process. If you aren't sure how the recipe will taste, divide the recipe in half and cut the meat in half. Mix half the spices in one cup of water, cook a sample. If the flavor is good, go ahead and do the same thing with the other half of the meat. If the flavor is too strong, you can mix in the other half of the meat. If it isn't flavorful enough, increase the spice-herb mixture. I'm going to take my meat, take about half of it out, and put it right here so I can follow this procedure. I've got one cup of ice water. For this recipe, I'm using a half a teaspoon of salt, a fourth a teaspoon of oregano, a fourth a teaspoon of basil, a fourth a teaspoon of black pepper, and garlic. I'm going to mix it up. As you can see, we've dissolved the spices and herbs. So they're much easier to mix in. Pour it in. And now I'm going to mix it completely. And as you can see, I've still got some ice cubes that help keep it nice and cold. Thorough mixing of the meat is crucial. Mixing by hand is cold, hard work. But don't quit too soon. Mix until the sausage has a uniform color and the spices are distributed evenly. It's much easier to mix a small amount of meat. So once again, use smaller quantities. Now that I've got it mixed up, I'm going to make a patty of the sausage. I'm going to cook it and test the flavor. At this point, the sausage can be left in bulk form or made into patties. Package bulk sausage in plastic freezer bags or in freezer paper. Refrigerate the sausage immediately or freeze for longer storage. The next section will provide guidelines for making sausage links. Now that we have our meat mixture ready, we're going to go through the steps for making link sausages. Casing materials for link sausage may be natural or man-made. Natural casings are the gastrointestinal tracks of cattle, sheep, and hogs. These are digestible and permeable to both moisture and smoke. Natural casings are available in one-pound packages. They are stored in salt and kept in the freezer. Rinse the casings before using them and let them soak in water for 30 minutes. As you can see, this is one pound of the natural casings and the salt is still in the bottom of the container. I've untied one and I have it here. As you can see, it's quite a bit different than it was to begin with. All this, the fact that you put water in it and let it flush makes it rehydrate. Now I've kind of got it lined up and I've got the end of the casing right here. And so one of the things you can do is just kind of take a little bubble of water and put in there and that helps it go on. So I'm going to feed this on to my tube. Now by holding the casing up and feeding it on, it sometimes helps if you put a little bit of water on your tube so it's nice and slick. Then you feed it on the whole length. Look, there's a parsley leaf from our spice mixture and we're just going to feed it right on. As you can see, you can get an awful lot of casing on this. You can back up, kind of get it straight again. It's another parsley leaf. Now what happens if you break the casing or somehow poke a hole in it? Well, that's just as long as your sausage is. Won't hurt? Remember that when it's done, they'll be linked and so as long as you have them in a way that you can link the sausages, you're fine. I've got it a little bit twisted right here at the end. I think we'll quit there. Now I'm going to cut this off. And one of the things you want to do is is leave you about a one-inch end so you have something to hold on to when you're putting your sausage in. Now we've got our sausage on. I'm going to crank this up and load my meat. Sausage stuffers come in a lot of different forms. You may have one of the old-fashioned ones that's kind of shaped like a banana and a lever on the end of it, but this one I find works very well for me. You want to load your sausage in, pack it down, make sure that you don't have any air bubbles because if you have air bubbles on the inside, when you start feeding the sausage out, you'll have an air bubble out of what comes out of them. Now, always the hardest thing about this is then you have your hands where they're not quite as clean as they once were. I'm going to clean my hands up, move that out of the way, and it's ready. It's hard to remember which way to crank it. So what I'm going to do is crank it down until I've put pressure on the meat. See? You can see it coming right out here. And this is a place where you want to make sure that your cabinet is all nicely clean and you can work right on the cabinet. And the sausage comes out and you control how fast it comes out and it fills up the sausage. You want it to be full enough to make a good sausage, but you don't want it to be so full that you burst the sausage or that you don't have any room to link it. Whoops. Okay. That's a good example. So we'll quit there. I'll put the rest of this sausage back in and I'll show you how to link it. You can tell I've still got sausage links on here. Just let my sausage come out just a little bit too fast. Okay. So I always just break them wherever I want and I make my links and twist them one this way and one the opposite way. Try to make your sausages about the same size because they're going to cook at the same speed. Okay. So that one's a little longer. I'll take a little bit out of this on this end and I have four nice little links here. Now in a moment, I'll put this meat back in my stuffer, but for right now, I'm going to start again and start feeding the sausage links out. And I don't want to go too fast again. Works nicely if you've got a partner. They can kind of help you keep things going. And as you can see right here, I've got a little bit of a hole, but that's okay. Again, I'll make my sausages. I'll just make sure that I break it right here where I've got that leak. Just a matter at that stage of continuing to work until you get all your sausage out of the inside. Now again, remember to make it about the same length so that they'll cook evenly. Now if you're using a man-made casing, you need the tie to form the link so you'll have to use some string to cut them to the right lengths. As you can see, we have different sizes of sausage stuffers depending on the type of casing you're using. We've been working with natural casings, but you do have man-made casings. They're fibrous or collagen and are uniform and come in a variety of diameters suited to different types of sausages. Fibrous casings must be removed before eating like the paper that's on the outside of salami. Sausage can be boiled, baked, grilled, or cooked in a skillet. I'm going to put just a little bit of water in here and then I'm going to put two of my sausages in. All ground meats, such as pork, mousse, veal, and lamb, should be cooked to an internal temperature of 160 degrees Fahrenheit. Turkey or poultry should be cooked to 165 degrees Fahrenheit and bare meat at least 185 degrees. Let's review some of the food safety practices that are so important when we're making sausage. Bacteria can spread throughout a work area and contaminate equipment and work surfaces. To reduce your chances of foodborne illness, wash your hands for at least 20 seconds with soap and water before beginning work and after changing tasks or after doing anything that might contaminate your hands. Start with clean equipment and clean thoroughly after using. Be sure that all surfaces that come in contact with meat are clean, then sanitize them. Sanitize surfaces with a solution of one tablespoon of bleach and one gallon of water. Allow it to air dry. If you're using frozen meat, thaw carefully in the refrigerator or in a cooler. Keep raw meat separate from ready-to-eat foods. Keep meat cold below 40 degrees Fahrenheit when making sausage. Now I think our sausage is just about ready to test. I think that'll do great for supper.