Cumberland Sausage

Prepare the casings

• You have a couple of options when choosing a casing to put your sausage meat in and hold your sausage together. You can use either synthetic or natural casings. I use hog casing (pigs intestines), which are natural casings.
• Most people buy natural casings that come packed in salt, so the first thing you need to do is rinse that salt off. First, soak the lump of salt and casings in water until they become soft and can be separated from each other, and rinse them well.
• Then a nice trick is to find the end of one casing, pry it open with your finger, full it over the kitchen tap and use an elastic band to keep it in place. Now turn on the tap and thoroughly flush out the salt. I let the tap run for a good few minutes. Once they are all flushed out, soak them in water in the fridge until needed.

Lets Grind That Meat

• You could use pre-ground meat, but then you don’t know what is in it. It’s best to grind it yourself using good quality meat: 75% meat and 25% fat.
• There are number of grinders available, from stand alone electric grinders to small manual grinders that attach to the worktop. I have tried a number, and they are all good for the job. The manual ones just burn of a few calories while you’re using them, which may not be a bad thing.
• Once you’ve got your grinder all set up, make sure the meat is cold, some use almost frozen, this makes sure that the meat and fat doesn’t turn to mush as your grinding. Chop you meat and fat into 1 inch cubes, mix it all together and pass it through the grinder using a coarse. Now mix in all the other ingredients for the sausage.
• Water is important as you want the mix to get to a sort of paste looking texture. The water helps the meat in the sausage retain the fat making it juicer.
• Once the meat is all ready, add the sausage stuffing attachment to the blender; make sure you remove the blade from the blender. Pull on the hog casing over the sausage attachment and tie off the end. Slowly pass the meat through the blender. Keep going until all of the meat has been used. Now starting at the end, twist the casing into sausage shapes. Twist each sausage in the opposite direction.

All done.