Sunday 13 March 2016

Anyone for a snag?

My Northern Hemisphere readers are probably wondering what a 'snag' is. :-) It is Aussie slang for sausage. If you happen to be planning on visiting our lovely country you can read more about Australian English by clicking here.

Our Simple Living Toowoomba group had a really great sausage making workshop on Saturday morning. One of our frequent workshop presenters Racheal, helped her hubby Rick in the sausage making process and we all ended up having a taste of the final product.



 This would probably be a vegetarian's worst nightmare but our one and only vegetarian left before the action started and she is probably reading this now and closing her eyes. LOL! We always have a cuppa, a chat and a swap before the workshops start so those who want to catch up but don't want to attend the workshop can just come along for that.



Firstly the chilled meat was cut up....



...then put through the mincer....



...then the casings were meticulously loaded onto the sausage stuffer...



...then out came the mixture into the casing (see the first photo) before being shaped into individual sausages.



We were shown how to make two different kinds of sausages. The first batch had a premix added and the second, which are the ones I tasted, were sweet Italian sausages. I preferred the latter as they were full of flavour although a tad too salty for my liking. The meat used was pork.

  • Some of the tips we were given were to make sure the mixture includes at least 25-30% fat
  • Chill the meat in the freezer before grinding and mixing
  • Grind the meat into a bowl that is set in ice
  • Use a precise amount of salt
  • Add ice-cold liquid when mixing the ground meat
  • Cook to an exact temperature e.g. 65C in general or 71C for sausages containing poultry. 

Rick and Racheal have a sausage stuffer something like this one on eBay.  However, they have a very large family so if you just wanted to make sausages now and again, apparently some mixers like KitchenAid have mincing and sausage stuffing attachments. I also saw this Euro Meat Grinder and Sausage Maker on eBay for 70% off at present which would probably be okay for a small family. I rarely buy sausages so am not tempted as the only ones in our freezer are the CEO's stash for taking fishing. ;-) Still, it was nice to see how they are made as I had never seen the complete process before from memory.

 


Before the workshop we had our usual swap and I came home with some lovely place mats made by Shiralee from A Peaceful Homemaker. Also some homemade tomato sauce, produce bags to make an 'easy, no sew kitchen scrubbie', some of Racheal's soap...




...and some freshly made biscuits which disappeared not long after I got home. 



Talking about getting home...I couldn't wait to go and look at my latest soap experiment to see if it was hard enough to get out of the mould. It wasn't quite....but that's for another blog post this week :-)

Have a great week everyone!
























11 comments:

  1. I do love a good snag but I don't think I'd be bothered making my own. Your
    group must have lots of fun at the workshops. I don't think we have anything like
    that in our town.

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    Replies
    1. Joolz, you could start your own group. It is a lot of fun.

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  2. Gee Chel, the soap turned out great! Love the new look on the blog.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Barb, it is quite pretty but there are quite a few holes in it. Maybe from air bubbles.

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  3. Hope you all enjoyed the workshop, the sausages look delicious, such a good idea to know exactly what you are eating.
    Good to catch up with everyone, will see you at the bee keeping day next month.

    Spotlight was suuuuuch a non event, nothing happening except 2 ladies sitting at a table doing crochet, answering questions. No competitions, games, samples, latest yarns info, demos or kids hands on activities.
    I just had a good poke around the clearance baskets and got some lovely pure cotton for facewashers ,so not a total waste of time.

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  4. Margaret, I checked my phone for a text from you but presumed it wasn't worth going out there when I didn't hear from you. Maybe the next one will be better.

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  5. What a great class I would love tyo do sausage making it is something I have wanted to do for ages.

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    Replies
    1. Fiona I found it very interesting. Rick had just learned himself and was happy to teach us.

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  6. I love reading and learning words from both Australia and England!! Broadening my vocabulary! We don't eat enough sausage to make it worthwhile to make our own, but I remember from my childhood helping - cleaning the casings was the worst - grandma use intestines that had to be cleaned! Ugh! I say that but it didn't make me stop eating them!

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    Replies
    1. Kathy, we do speak another language over here. Ha ha!

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