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Sausages!

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We made our first sausages today. For a long time now I've been looking for sausages like McCarthy's butcher used to make in Reading Road South, Fleet when I was a kid. Never found anything quite like them: they were made with coarsely ground pork and lots of herbs and were delicious.

We've tried lots of local butchers and although some, like Philip Bull (is that a great name for a butcher or what?) of Waterbeach, do decent tasting pork and sage, they all grind the pork too finely.

So Beth bought a grinder and some pork "casings" (sausage skins to you and me, they come in a tub, heavily salted, and the minimum quantity is about 100m!) and today we gave it a go. We went to the butcher on the Over road at Willingham and bought a big bit of pork, essentially a hand with a bit of hock and belly still attached. About 5.5kg and he charged us £17 for it so it was a bargain (£3/kg, bone in).

Out of that we got a bowl of pork crackling, a belly joint (which we're going to have tomorrow for supper), a small shoulder joint for later, 38 sausages and and two bags of diced pork (left over when we had finished making sausages).

Here's a picture of the first batch of sausages. These were pork and sage.

Our first sausages

They were made with 1kg of coarsely ground pork, 100g of fine bread crumbs (from some organic white I made yesterday, put through the food processor), chopped sage from out of the garden, a teaspoon of salt and about the same of ground black pepper, plus a little chilli powder.

We then went on to make some pork and bacon sausages, using 25% bacon (which Beth had made earlier in the week - yup, we make our own bacon too, well Beth does) and 75% pork and with a lot less sage but a little dried mixed herb. We finely ground the bacon and coarsely ground the pork.

We fried one of the pork and herb at the time, and had three of the pork and bacon ones each for supper. All quite yummie.

So the freezer is now full of sausages.

Tags: food Written 09/10/04

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