It's Sausage Time!

Well I've started sorting through Roberts pictures (all 2.7 GB of them!) and the first batch are now up at Flickr........not sure what was happening here

cardiac arrest or comedy moment......you decide!

A few posts back a question was asked about making sausages and I said that I'd try to get some pictures arranged to show one of the ways that we make them (when I say 'we' I obviously mean someone else as Pick is the king of the sausages in our team). So here follows another 'photo love story' style collection to give you an idea of how he does it.

First stage is to take the meat (beef in this case as it was both to hand and spare!) and pick it clean, removing any excessive pieces of sinew and the fat too.

We remove the fat at this stage so that we can control how much is in the final product (we could also then choose to use a different fat to change/enhance the flavour)
The meat is then finely sliced with a knife, before the mincing begins.

The meat can then be seasoned according to recipe or taste....in this example with some minced herbs (sage and thyme I believe) as well as ground salt, black and long pepper.

next comes the tricky bit and the bit that's hardest to explain....I really should have taken video of this but not everyone can be perfect now can they?
First you find the end of the piece of gut...

Then, and here's the difficult to explain part, holding some of the mixture in the palm of the hand, use the same thumb to push the mix into the gut that you are holding open with your other fingers.

You then just keep repeating this process until you have either filled the guts completely or used up all of the mixture.

Hopefully that all makes some sense.......if not, then just ask away for clarification.....any how, that's enough for now.....more stuff later on.