Have you ever chewed on a bite of sausage or
salami and found a bone chip, or a piece of hard white “gristle” that shocked your
teeth? I only experience that on rare occasions when eating commercially
made sausage at a restaurant. When they say they use “the whole
hog,” they’re telling mostly the truth.
When you make your own homemade sausage, you will
not put every possible scrap in the meat you’re going to grind. You’ll
remove any little blood clots, the tendons, the ligaments, the bone fragments,
and you’ll
leave nothing in the meat that you aren’t willing to eat. You certainly
won’t want your family and friends eating something that you yourself
aren’t willing to eat either.
.
The best primal cut of pork to make homemade
sausage out of is the shoulder butt. The shoulder butt adjoins
the pork shoulder, or “picnic shoulder,” at
the top of the shoulder, between the rib end of the pork loin, and the
head. What little neck the pig has is mostly a part of the shoulder butt,
at the fat end. The outside of the shoulder butt, the skin side, is a
layer of white fat. How thick the fat layer is varies, but if you want
very lean homemade sausage, nearly all of that layer can be easily cut
off.
The
neck end of the shoulder butt, the fat end, contains a gland. The gland
is grayish, usually about an inch across, and if you cut into it, is
shiny. It’s very easy to see, and very easy to distinguish it from
the white fat. The gland, while harmless, left in the meat, can give
the homemade sausage a bitter taste. As you cut the shoulder butt into
strips about 1 ½ inches square (for easy feeding into a small
grinder) it’s easy to remove as much fat as you wish. Too, if you
haven’t
seen the gland yet, you will while cutting the meat into strips. Any
sausage needs some fat for flavoring the meat, but you should be the
sole monitor of how much of it you want in your own homeade sausage.
As you’re cutting the shoulder butt, you’ll
sometimes find a small blood clot or two around the bone, which of course
should be removed. It’s harmless, but can make a black spot in
your fried sausage. You’ll find connective tendons and ligaments
that are easy to identify. They’ll be white and shiny, hard and
tough. They’re
easily removed by simply sliding your knife blade along them. Finally
remove the bone and the bone chips that you’ll almost always find,
and you’ll have the finest meat that homemade sausage can be made
from.
All the above you can do when you make your
own homemade sausage. If that care were taken in commercial sausage,
if the commercial guys removed all the little annoying parts described
above, we wouldn’t find the
little bone chips, little white pieces of cartilage, the little black
spots, and the fat content that sometimes borders on “disgusting.”
Fresh? Unless you raise your own hogs, you can’t
get any fresher sausage than what you make at home. You’ll be completely
amazed at the difference between homemade sausage and commerical sausage.
Click on homemade sausage casings to proceed.
|
