Sausage making

This week we had our meat practical, where we made sausages. We had a group of 8 of us, and split ourselves in to two groups of three and one of two. 

The first group worked on the premium sausage, the second on the standard sausage and the third (my group) on the budget sausage. The only difference really was the percentage of lean pork that was used. The premium sausage obviously had to most lean meat, where as the budget contained less.

We all prepared out meat and chose how were were going to flavour it. My group, which also had Steph and Saina in, chose to add rosemary and thyme to ours... mainly because of the TV show. We also added some salt and pepper. 

We each in turn minced our batch of ingredients and then it was time to pump the sausage meat into the skins. Now this was the funny bit. 

The premium sausage group went first, and this was hilarious as one of the girls was just making innuendos throughout the whole thing and had us all laughing, including our lecturer. They packed the meat into the machine and fed the skin onto the nozzle. They had some luck with this, but it didn't seem to work very well, at one point sausage meat was launched at speed across the room, splatting over another machine. This was hilarious, but luckily nobody was stood there, despite how funny that would be!

Our lecturer got someone in to help with the machine, and it was apparently because the intestines hadn't been washed properly so that was why it wasn't working properly. So they washed the intestines and it worked better after that. 

After the standard sausage group did theirs it was our turn to do ours. First of all Saina was in charge of feeding the sausage out the other side. This goes quicker than you'd think and is actually really difficult! I then switched with Saina and fed through the last of the mix. We ended up with quite a lot of sausages, as you can see by the photo. 

Our budget sausages

 Also, where the skin split in places with took the meat out the skin and kept the meat, and later that day I made some sausage rolls from them. They were so good!

Our sausage rolls

We were really pleased how ours turned out. You can taste the rosemary and thyme really well but because oh the meat percentage it lacks the meaty flavour until the end really. Also, when cooking the sausages the fat content is noticable as they ooze a lot of fat.

As Steph is in catered accommodation she gets food throughout the week, but not at weekends. So today she came over for dinner and we used out sausages to make good ol' bangers and mash! Yummy! 

Bangers and mash!