Had some family and a few friends over last night and we put together just shy of 200 lbs of venison/pork sausage. Most was Italian or Polish sausage. And the last 25 lbs was a breakfast blend with maple flavor. We even fired up the Traeger and cooked a bunch of it up while we were working. Had a great time and put a lot of meat in the freezer for all of us.
Yes it is. I bought it a number of years ago before we started doing bigger batches. Back then we were just doing much smaller batches. A bigger stuffer is def on the list for the future. I ground all the deer meat but not the pork. The pork is the same price at the butcher wether it's ground or not.
Great pics Sean. Having some of it to munch on while you were doing all that work must have been a big hit with everyone...
I tried 1 batch with a kitchen aid stuffer and said never again. Went with the 11lb hakka stuffer from Amazon. Working pretty good so far, very solid. Ever get onto Len poli's site? www.lpoli.50webs.com - he has all kinds of formulas I want to try
I have not, I'll check it out. I get most of my seasonings and casings ect from Sausagemaker.com. The 5 lb stuffer works well but when doing big batches like this a bigger one would make it go quicker. The last time we made this much the packaging was the delay. We only had 1 vacuum packer and it actually shut off bc it got too hot. That vacuumm packer was my brothers and I wanted one anyways so I bought one as well. That sped that up a lot. This last round we kept everything going pretty smooth, the stuffer was a little slower then the rest of the stations going but not too bad. Another thing I learned when we did this batch is that the stuffer I have needs another tube that is smaller for breakfast sausage or snack sticks. The casing we used were 22mil and they were too small to fit on the smallest tube I had easily. Ended up ripping a few of them so we just packed it in ground meat bags. We tried stuffing with the kitchen aid as well many years ago. NOT FUN! lol grinding does work with it but painfully slow.
Great pictures. I assume that's you running into the sausage prep room with two cans of "fuel"? I make a bunch of sausage each year. Like you, used to use the Kitchen Aid and it was pretty bad. Vertical stuffer makes it a breeze. The latest short cut is getting the butcher to grind meat for me and mix in the spices I give them.
Do you seal right after stuffing? Do they keep shape pretty well? I haven't done batches more than 60lbs, but I will freeze the links for a beer or two then seal them up.
I have a cook that offered to grind everything for me. He could do a hundred pounds in no time. But we decided last minute to do it so I didn't have time to take it to him as it was weekend and he wasn't working.
Nice work swags! Sausage making is my next venture in the processing world. I've been processing my deer and even some friends deer for years now but I've never gotten into making sausage. I keep a few roasts and the backstraps from each deer but grind pretty much everything else. Aside from a stuffer, can you point me in the right direction for what casings and seasonings to use? I've mixed plenty of loose breakfast grind and some sage here and there but id like to learn more.
The best thing for me was checking out the website Sausagemaker.com. They have lots of different seasoning blends that you can try and when you click on a specific blend it will tell you what casing they recommend. I like a natural casing for our sausages. The mild Italian Hot blend is the one we like the best. We usually do Polish as well. The casings for these are 32-35mil hog casings. This year we tried the breakfast blend and that was awesome. That blend we used 22-25 mil sheep casings. Most stuffers dont come with a small enough tube for that so you would need to buy an extra tube for the smaller casings. This smaller tube would also work for snack sticks. As far as stuffing you want to make sure you have plenty of water in the mix to get the meat mixture to go through the stuffer and casings. Your welcome to PM me and ill give you my number to call. I can give you more specific details and things weve learned.