Cindy Vine on Sausages
Sausage-making for dummies
Some women sew, others crochet and still others do scrapbooking. I make sausages. Homemade sausages. Delicious tasty sausages. I have many different sausage recipes I got off the internet and enjoy experimenting by changing them slightly. So now the range of sausages I can make includes many different varieties of boerewors, the traditional South African sausage; kielbasa; bratwurst; knockwurst; Russians; English bangers; Irish bangers, cumberland; medisterpolse, boudin blanc; Italian spicy, andouille; sosatie wors just to name a few.
In New Zealand I found their sausages to be unpalatable, so filled with filler and so little meat that they tasted like they were actually stuffed with recycled newspaper. In Australia, the snags weren't much better. In China, they were god-awful bad. Luckily, in New Zealand there were quite a few South African butchers who made boerewors to keep me satisfied. However, in China there was nothing, so if I wanted quality sausage for my BBQ then I had to make my own.
I started off small with a small hand mincer/sausage stuffer my stepmom gave me on a visit to South Africa. It developed my arm muscle cranking that handle and it took ages, but was worth the effort. I now had boerewors for my BBQs. The first time I minced my own meat but it was such a schlep, that I decided to rather buy mince from the supermarket. With no Chinese, this proved a small problem, but my acting abilities and sound effects came to the fore and they soon found out when I pointed to meat and said jrrrrrrrrr, then I meant for them to mince it.
Getting the hog casings also proved to be an initial adventure, but then I discovered that China actually exports a lot of the hog casings used in the making of sausages to South Africa and the rest of the world. So I sourced the big suppliers here and bought a whole heap which I've shipped to South Africa with my shipment. Hope the customs guys and their sniffer dogs don't find it!
Pork is easy to come by. I think there might possibly be more pigs in china than people. However, beef is a little rarer and lamb or mutton virtually impossible. You can't get it at all from the local supermarkets and market butchers, only the more expensive shops catering for expats. You pay megabucks for it and it comes from Mongolia. Australian lamb costs almost as much as a plane ticket to Beijing from Nanjing. So, I use mostly pork. However, for my Jewish and Muslim customers, I use beef stuffed into sheep casings.
As orders poured in, I was no longer able to cope with my little hand machine and bought a big 20 litre sausage stuffer. But, that has gone with my shipment and I made sure that I kept my hand machine behind. Hopefully, I'll be able to carry it in my hand luggage on the plane. So, today I made some sausages and took step-by-step photos to show you how easy it is to do. You too can make your own sausages, just get the recipes off the internet.
