Sausage, Anyone?

What better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than to make your own meat! One of the things that my husband enjoys doing is processing our own meat. Of course I always get roped into helping, but I don't mind. I get to see where and how some of our meat is made and I get to package it how I want. We start with trim pieces of meat that have previously been frozen. Partially frozen meat will grind better when going through the grinder. Today we processed deer and pork. The deer got turned into ground deer for jerky meat and the pork got turned into brats, Italian sausage, and plain ground pork. My husband has a special concoction of seasonings that he adds for our brats, and I even use some in a soup recipe that I made. (I will have to post that recipe later!)

It all starts in a grinder that looks like this:

Inside there is a blade that cuts the meat and then it comes out through a plate with holes. There are several different plates with different sized holes. The bigger the hole, the coarser the meat. It comes out looking like this:

Then some of it gets weighed so we know how much seasoning to add, and it gets run back through the grinder to get mixed. We have special plates for that so it does not get ground too fine.

Once the seasoning is added, some of it gets run through the stuffing horn to be made into brats.

My job is to wrap the meat. I think I have become an expert at it! Then it's back to the freezer until we are ready to use our sausage and ground meat!