Sep 24 - what's your hourly rate ?

I hope that it's low, because that's the only way that you can justify making sausages yourself !

Last year I purchased the meat grinding and sausage stuffing attachments for our stand mixer.  I had in mind that I would make Sandy's veal sausages that aren't available anymore.  The place where we used to get them now clearly labels them as Bratwurst ... and there's no veal.  Sandy thinks that and had been told that, there used to be veal, but we don't know that for sure (I don't know that for sure).

What we used to buy and sausages we still buy, also have spinach in them.  So I looked for a recipe for veal sausages with spinach, found one, took the "45 minute prep time" to heart, and started.  Sandy had purchased the veal, pork, pork fat back; I picked up the heavy cream and a few other items including spinach.  A while ago Sandy had picked up the natural casing.

It isn't a quick process.  I have no idea how anyone could possibly do this in 45 minutes.  Just prepping the spinach takes longer than 45 minutes (trim, steam, chop and cool).  However, I had an afternoon to waste, so I had at it !

The recommended procedure used the food processor but I decided to use the meat grinder.  That by itself took a lot of time as the meat should have been trimmed better (my fault) and the dividing membranes in the meat clog the grinder.   I realized afterwards that I could have pushed it directly into the casing but instead ground it into a bowl and then did the stuffing.  The trouble with the stuffing is that the mixture isn't liquid enough to be drawn forward by the auger so it's a slow process of push, push, push into the hopper.  Doing it one step would have been easier and faster as it's easier to push meat chunks than the mushy mixture.

Three hours ?  3.5 hours ?  Something like that and I had a long sausage that I then tied off in links.  The next step is to simmer them for 10 minutes, which I did.  Ugh.  About 1/4 of them burst out of the casing.  I'd filled the casings too full, it seems, but that's something that you'd learn from experience. 

We had sausages for dinner.  They were ok, but nowhere near the same as what we'd purchased before.  The original had flecks of spinach; these had massive amounts of spinach.  Spinach was almost the dominant flavour !  The result won't go to waste and I'm game to try again, but a tiny bit of spinach (1/4 or 1/8 of what I used) would probably do the trick and I'd probably use more veal, less pork and remove those inter-muscular membranes completely.  I'd still use the meat grinder because I think that's the easiest way to get from meat chunk to casing.

I will probably try other sausages, now that I know how this all works.  Italian, Chorizo ... there are hundreds upon hundreds of recipes. 

Oh yes, cleanup ... that took almost 45 minutes -- perhaps that's what the recipe meant ?

Onward !