This past week I smoked a bunch of sausage. I made two types, Andouille and Garlic. The recipes for each one are in the "Enjoy" section of this blog site.
To start, I bought boneless pork shoulder from Costco. They have great prices on large packages (just what I need) of pork. The two shoulder pack contained a little over 15 lbs of meat. The package was cubed and grinded using my LEM grinder and split the following ways.
1 Pound was used to create a quick fresh Chorizo sausage (I will add this recipe to the blog at some point) that I mixed in with fresh ground beef to make chorizo burgers.
1 Pound was cut into 1 inch cubes that Chris used to make a new recipe of Port Rillettes. Its basically slow cooked pork glazed with red wine and sugar until the glaze is like molasses.
1.5 Pounds was cubed and frozen for now. I am going to make dried sausage in the future and I purchased some heritage pork shoulder for that recipe. In the past I have used only grocery store generic pork. This year I want to see the difference that heritage pork makes in the dried sausage. The 1.5 pounds of Costco meat is to have a baseline to do a side by side comparison. I freeze all my pork that will be used for dried for food safety reasons.
2.5 Pounds was ground and added to ground beef to create Italian meat balls. I create the balls and freeze them uncooked. Then when needed, they are browned in the oven and added to whatever recipe is needed.
The final 9 pounds was split into 5 pounds of Andouille and 4 pounds of Garlic sausage. It was a cold day in New Jersey when I smoked the sausage. The smoker could never get above 170 degrees, so after 2 hours of smoke, I moved the sausage for 35 minutes to a 210 degree oven. They came out great.
I finished my bag of Sausage casings with these two recipes and as I write this I see that Amazon no longer caries the casings! I will have to find another brand or another source for the future.
Enjoy your weekend and happy cooking!
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