Grace bought me a Porkert sausage maker for Christmas – it’s fantastic. It’s something that I always wanted but I didn’t know it… and while I can’t pretend to be an expert (I’ve only made three pounds of sausage so far), it is great fun – and already we’re making very nice sausages indeed.
It is actually as good as it looks on the box (right), even though these things rarely are. I’m sure that there are electric sausage makers, and that in the world of manually operated mechanical sausage makers there are lovely British-made models with nice safety guards and child-friendly handles… but not for our Portkert N°5!
Made in the Czech Republic, we got no instructions with the machine at all, and opening the brown cardboard box we found some greaseproof paper wrapping the tin-plated cast-iron mincer and its blades – all we had to guide us was a series of diagrams on the back of the box. This is my favourite image – it tells you everything you need to know:
First off, I gave the machine a good wash (it arrives with a bit of grease on each part of the machine – not sausage grease, but machine grease. After mincing a couple of onions to get a feel of what we should be doing (and to clean through any grease left over), we set to work.
Meat in the top, mince out at the bottom – simple as that!
No gristle, no knuckles, no eyes, no brains
I didn’t know anything about sausages until now, but after a bit of reading, I am getting there. Sausages aren’t just pork, they need particular cuts of pork, and they also need rusk or breadcrumbs to absorb the fat/flavour and stop them from being too dense, and of course they also need seasoning – salt, pepper, nutmeg, ginger and some herbs.
A good sausage should be about 25% fat – much less than that and it’s not a sausage, and you’ll not really be able to fry it. I read that a sausage should be made with pork belly or pork shoulder (or a mix of the two to acheive the 25% fat), but so far I have only used belly.
Seasoning – version one (photo without the salt):
Freshly ground nutmeg, black and white pepper along with powedered ginger
After a bit of reading, I settled on making the sausage with 80% meat, 11% water, 6½% breadcrumbs and 2½% seasoning. The seasoning I used was 28g salt, 3½g each of white pepper, black pepper and nutmeg, and then 2g of mace and ginger. Mace is made from the coating of nutmeg nuts, and since I didn’t have any, I just used extra nutmeg.
I used breadcrumbs instead of ‘rusk’, but only because I *had* bread which I could dry out and break down, and I didn’t have any rusk. The first batch of sausages were way too salty and we couldn’t really taste the nutmeg so I used 1¼% of seasoning instead of 2½%, and then added more nutmeg and about half a teaspoon of sage. That really worked well.
Everything mixed together
I bought the meat from Sainsbury’s, I got pork belly (but they labelled it “streaky rashers”) cut into strips. It was a pack weighing 616g, so that meant 616g was 80% of the weight – so a bit of simple maths on the percentage split of the ingredients above left me with 50g breadcrumbs, 100g water and 8g of my seasoning mixture. Mixed together in a bowl and we have mashed sausage ready to go into tubes.
The Porkert machine comes apart, the blade comes out, and the metal grinding plate from the front is replaced by a plastic funnel, around which goes the dry sausage skin. Feeding the mix back through the machine, we could get it into the skin – it’s probably the hardest bit of making the sausage, but I’m sure it’ll get easier with experience.
Sausage mix in the top, sausages at the bottom this time!
I thought that it would be easier for our first time to make one giant sausage and cook it as a Cumberland-like ring. No such luck – too much meat going into the skin and it burst, so I had to master the art of twisting the filled skin without breaking it or without leaving any bit of sausage un-filled. Alternating the twists clockwise and anti-clockwise between sausages is supposed to make the “links” stay together, but each time I’ve done it so far, by the time it comes to the second twist I’ve forgotten which way I did the previous one!
Finished sausages frying in the pan
The result was good though – the first ones looked like a sausage even though they were a bit salty, but the second ones – with half the seasoning but twice the nutmeg and a sprinkle of sage were delicious. Since we’re using dried skins (not sure what the skin is made from yet, but I will find out), the finished sausages have to sit in the fridge overnight to ‘hydrate’ the skin. That’s not too bad – to be honest after all of the preparation (and then washing the Porkert machine itself, drying it and putting it away), you want a cup of tea – not a sausage.
Egg laid by the hens this morning, sausages hand-made last night.
You know you want to!
I’ll keep up with trying different things – as well as investigating rusk and different cuts of meat, Grace has suggested we try ground down oats instead of bread/rusk, Annette wants to try different ways of reaching 25% fat (less fatty meat mixed with olive oil). I think that the consistency with the breadcrumbs has been perfect and that there’s only really room for improvement with the herbs (we only had old nutmeg so with some fresh that should improve too).
I did lots of Googling to find out what to do, what to use and how to do it. I read everything that I could and then based everything above on bits and pieces from things that I had read. I visited many websites, but if you fancy reading more than I’ve put here, these are the sites that I bookmarked:
- Meat / Food Grinders
A long page with lots of useful information on grinders in general - Johnny’s Cumberlands
Recipe from the Sausage Fans website – “dedicated to the promotion and preservation of the great tasty sausage” - Sausage making tutorial
Tutorial on sausage making from Sausage Mania - Easy Recipes from SausageMania
“Everything You Need to Know for Mouth-Watering Success”, recipes from the Sausage Mania website - Design A Sausage
UK suppliers of the Porkert machine, the website sells seasoning mixtures but I think half of the fun is in making your own - Sausage making recipes
Recipes discussion forum on sausagemaking.org