Sausage: Meat Grinder Method | suck it, martha

Thanks to my wonderful sweetie, I can demonstrate to you how to make sausage the meat grinder method.

Because I have a meat grinder.

Let me back up.

For weeks before Christmas I was told that El Guapo had a really good gift for me. Really good.

from infamouskidd

This was like torture for me. But I never asked what it was, because in reality I did want to be surprised.

But it was like pulling teeth not to ask.

from ellen

So I wanted to open presents on Monday the 19th. Hey, it’s close to Christmas, we’ve both got all our presents done, and I WANT TO OPEN MY PRESENTS!

El Guapo said “No, you need to learn patience. We’ll open them on Christmas Eve.”

Ok, hellz no I’m not waiting that long.

from ellen

Well I didn’t have to. We compromised for…the day before Christmas Eve.

I rarely win these things.

So here’s what I woke up to on Christmas Eve Eve.

presents!

You can’t tell, but there’s Christmas bush, complete with lights, on top of that stool. It’s very festive.

And here’s what was in the boxes:

yup, she's mine!

This and 2 marvelous attachments–a food grinder and a sausage stuffer (I have to find casing somewhere).

where you attach it

So OF COURSE the first thing I did was make some sausage. I happened to have all the ingredients in the fridge.

Ingredients:

• 4 ounces cheddar
• 2 jalepenos
• 3 pounds turkey
• skin of 4 chicken thighs
• 7 sprigs of sage
• 1 cup-ish of panko
• chili flakes to taste
• cayenne to taste
• white pepper to taste
• salt

So here’s my new baby set up for the first time.

the new beauty

Did you notice the clean lines? The sleek bowl? The way hat head gently and powerfully tilts back?

I’ll stop.

Here’s what the food grinder looks like attached.

food grinder attached

And here’s a close-up of the place you shove the un-grinded food.

where you shove the food

And where the grinded-up food comes out.

where it exits

Isn’t that blue gorgeous?

So again, I preferred to cut up the non-ecoli-bearing ingredients before I hit the meat.

So I cut up the cheese,

cheese

and the jalepenos. I removed most of the seeds form the jalpenos because I wanted them for flavor, but I wanted to get my spicy from somewhere else.

and the spicy

Ok, next thing to do is get the hands dirty.

Cut the meat into 1-inch strips. I used turkey.

It’s narsty.

pre-cutting

cut, with sage

Now turkey is a really lean meat, and sausage requires fat, and I wanted to keep this sausage in the poultry-only family, so I saved some chicken skin from last night’s dinner to add to the mix.

chicken skin

Ok, so I just alternated putting ingredients (cheddar, turkey, chicken skin, jalepenos, and fresh sage–about 7 sprigs) into the food grinder so that everything sort of got all mashed up together.

Here’s the first bit of meat emerging. It’s blurry, but it was an epoch in my life, so blurry or not, here it is.

emerging

More of the meat emerging.

with some jalepenos

Make sure you’ve got a bowl positioned below the grinder.

in the bowl

Once you’ve ground up all the meat and other ingredients, add the spices and panko to the mix.

spices and stuff

Mush it all together with your hands.

mushed

Then form the mush into patties.

patties

You need to let the patties sit in the fridge for at least 12 hours for the flavors to meld together.

After the melding period you can either:

1. refrigerate up to 3 days
2. freeze up to 1 month
3. cook in a pan with some oil

I went with Option 3.

yum

Make sure you fully cook it.

suck it, martha.

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