Sausage Making

[sharksoup]

Just tried my hand for the first time last weekend at home sausage making. I made a recipe from Paul Kirk's "Championship Barbecue" book. It's called Beginners Chilli Sausage, and it's basically ground pork shoulder seasoned with chilli powders and other spices. I started with 3.5 lbs of pork shoulder that was quite fatty as I cubed it and ground it. However the resulting sausage after cooking was rather dry. I grilled the sausage no differently than I've ever grilled any purchased sausages so I think I can safely rule out the cooking process as causing the dryness.

I know there are a lot of guidelines about the proper fat content for making proper sausage (about one-third), but I've read a number of recipes like Paul Kirk's and others that use just pork butt (as I did) with no additional fat.

How do you know if the pork you are using is fatty enough to produce the right moisture and texture? Does the amount of mixing/kneading you do to the meat prior to stuffing it affect the final moisture? Because I donned a pair of rubber gloves and really mixed it well.

Thanks for any tips.

[jsolomon]

How finely did you grind the sausage? Having finely ground sausage can also cause a drier texture.

Aside from that, I usually ask my butcher what the fat percentage is, and then figure he's low-balling it.

[Busboy]

No meat is fatty enough (IMHO) to make a truly succulent sausage without a little help from our good friend fatback. For a pork shoulder, I'd reccommend about 3-1 meat to fatback. If that seems like a lot, remember that a good deal of it is lost during cooking.

I just made some lamb sausages from a leg that was even leaner than a pork shoulder, so I probably went even a little higher. The assembled guests fell upon them like beasts, and almost came to fisticuffs over seconds.

[sharksoup]

How finely did you grind the sausage?  Having finely ground sausage can also cause a drier texture.

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I used the larger sized plate of the two that came with my KitchenAid stand mixer meat grinder attachment. In hindsight, the meat in the cooked sausage had a very fine texture almost mincemeat texture to it so I can see where it might have been ground too fine. I did chill the meat quite a bit as recommended prior to grinding, but I do recall that towards the end of the grinding process the meat was not coming through the plates too cleanly; it seemed to be backed up a bit and bulging out, so maybe it was getting ground too finely.

[Luckylies]

70/30 meat/ fat. and you''ll never have dry snausage. or pate.

[sharksoup]

70/30 meat/ fat. and you''ll never have dry snausage. or pate.

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So how does an inexperienced grasshopper like myself know whether the seemlingly fatty pork shoulder they selected is 70/30 meat-fat or 80/20 meat-fat without grinding/stuffing/cooking a whole batch and then feeling the disappointment associated with the incorrect proportion if I guessed wrong??