Serious Eats, and Serious Meats...

Is there anything better than sausage?  I'm sure there is, but as seriously as we take all of our meat at the Thistle and Lily, many of our favorite go-to meals involve sausage.  The humble hog, along with common herbs and spices, will supply an amazing variety of foods.  We took the opportunity this weekend alongside our favorite butchering-buddies, the Fall family, to really explore and expand our charcuterie skills.  We took a whole hog, (and a large one at that: 450lbs,) and butchered it for the sole purpose of sausage making, with the only exception being the tenderloin and, of course, the bacon.  We all agreed that if we wasted the bacon, then heaven would rain upon us fire, brimstone, lightning, and maybe even something really stinky as well, just so God could be sure of us knowing his displeasure at wasting bacon.

The Falls brought a hog to butcher as well, and together, we made nearly 260 pounds of pork to grind, mix, stuff, and/or smoke.  We've done something like this before, without ever committing an entire beast to sausage, though, and we feel like we always ran out of sausage too quickly, and aways previously, we've purchased the seasonings in premixed bags from commercial food processors.  We figured that if we're going to all the trouble of breeding, farrowing, and raising our own stock, why would we "sell out" at the last minute and trust someone else to make a quality sausage mix for us?  Well, we wouldn't, and neither would you.  We went "whole hog." I reckoned I could do it as well or better than those people, so Herself and I searched out the best sounding sausage recipes for pork sausages, and came up with recipes for the following:

German (or Garlic Sausage)

Kielbasa (our fave)

Sage breakfast

Italian

Andouille

Hot Links (the one exception)

Why, you ask?  Because we can.  And because we want to.  And because the Fall-Foster team is an awesome force to behold.  We could probably charge admission for people to come and watch the gore flying around.  We literally stuffed nearly TWO FOOTBALL FIELDS worth of sausage casings today!

Some of the ingredients.

about 9 foot long stretched out. 450 pounds.

Above is what 260 pounds of sausage looks like, bagged, roped and linked.  This is besides the other hog's ham, bacon, tenderloin, and loin roasts.

I know, a walk in freezer is a little over the top, right?  But if you are serious about your charcuterie, you NEED a walk-in freezer...

50 lbs of Kielbasa on the rotisserie.

And finally, kielbasas in the cooler next to the pork bellies brining for a week to be made into bacon.

I know that isn't for everybody, (obviously) but I can't express the amount of fulfillment I get from being a producer, instead of a consumer.  Not to mention providing for my family some seriously good eats!