I took two fresh Boston Butt pork roasts from Paradise Meat Locker and cut the meat into about inch and a half cubes. We spiced the meat with the recipe that I posted yesterday for bratwurst. We ran that through a manual meat grinder, using the course cutting disk, then refrigerated the meat for an hour while I got the hog casings ready by soaking and rinsing them.

Putting the first casing on the sausage stuffing horn got a laugh out of Karen. Just the hand motion involved tickled her for some reason. We ground the meat up one more time using the fine cutting disc, then loaded up the sausage stuffer. The actual sausage making was something that took about two pounds of meat to really get the hang of. Loading the casing onto the horn is an important thing to do correctly, or the skin will hang up coming off. If it does that then the sausage will overfill and burst the skin. We did that one time. We just tied off upstream and downstream of the break and kept on truckin’. 

Here is the final product, which we ate for dinner last night:

I can now make my own kielbasa, wursts, hot dogs. I will make them, too, because the German in me loves the sausage. The American in me hates that I don’t know what is in the sausages that I buy at the store, and that even if I did, I wouldn’t know what those chemicals can do to a person long-term. One less thing that I have to worry about.

There are lots of great videos of people stuffing sausages online. I can now tell you that it’s really as easy as it seems to be. The hardest part of the job is the second grind of the meat. If you had an electric meat grinder then that part wouldn’t even be hard. Then the hardest part would be cleaning up all of the tools that you use to make your sausage.

Good luck, and remember…it’s just that easy!