Sausages # 1 -First Attempt!

@Lucyapley bought me Paul Peacock's "The Sausage Book" a while ago, and I made up my mind last week to use some of our pork mince to experiment with.  I ordered some sheep's intestine and some sausage nozzles from Amazon for our vintage Kenwood Chef.

I decided to make 3 different varieties: Basic Breakfast Sausage for the kids, Cumberland for Jo, and Linguica (a Portuguese Paprika sausage) for me!  After a morning of logging up a Silver Birch and going out for a last minute ingredient shop I began.

Ingredients!

This is the method I used:

Paprika Sausage: (based on Paul Peacock's Linguica)

Put 10g Smoked Paprika, 4g black pepper corns, 13g rock salt, 5 garlic cloves (crushed), 1 teaspoon of Chilli powder and a small glass of red wine into a blender and pulse until it looks like this:


Paprika Sausage Sauce!

I bought a bargain 'reduced' loaf of Polish brown bread and spread it out over the shelves of the oven and heated it in the oven at 100C for about 25 minutes until is was nice and dry, and then, in a clean blender jug made 100g of it into breadcrumbs and combined it with the Paprika Sausage Sauce.  Meantime the pork mince had defrosted (about 700g), and I added it to the bowl and started kneading.  I thoroughly kneaded and combined it - very similar process to breadmaking at this stage.  At this point the mixture looked like this:


Paprika Sausage Mix Ready for Stuffing!

Stuffing update at the end.

Cumberland Sausage (Based on Paul Peacock's Recipe)

I combined 10g black pepper corns, 10g sea salt, 5g nutmeg powder, a few shakes of mace, a small glass of white wine and blended them.  Same process as the Paprika sausage with 100g breadcrumbs to make a smooth paste.  Then I added 700g minced Saddleback Shoulder and kneaded to a lovely looking sausagey mix.

Basic Breakfast Sausage (Based on Paul Peacock's Recipe)

5g black pepper corns, 5g sea salt, 100g breadcrumbs and a glass of water, same process as the previous recipes.

Stuffing!

I soaked the sausage skin in cold water for about 2 hours - I was expecting a horrendous stink as described in Paul Peacock's book, but actually there wasn't any unpleasant smell.  After soaking I then ran tap water through the skins - easier said than done - it's quite tricky to open up the end and I'd managed to get it into quite a tangle during the soaking.  However, finally managed to get it all untangled and rolled onto the end of the sausage nozzle.

It worked really well - a few hiccups, most significant being running out of skins after the Cumberland and Basic Breakfast sausages!  Still - quite looking forward to Smoked Paprika burgers!



Tymawr Farm Cumberland Sausages!

Ben & Kate enjoyed eating their Basic Breakfast Sausages for tea tonight - Ben (2 and a half) ate 1 1/2 big sausages with mash, and Kate (nearly 9 months) ate nearly a whole one with mash.  Really glad about that - quite an achievement with normally quite discerning customers!

Jo and I ate one each too as a snack and they were really delicious (though I say so myself) - surprisingly peppery though (which we really like, but surprised the kids liked them).  Quite fortunate that they are nice as we are going to be eating them for breakfast, lunch and dinner for the next 2 days!


Chickens # 9 - New Arrivals!

Jo, Ben, Kate and I drove over to Stewart at www.salspurebreedpoultryinwales.co.uk on Sunday morning to pick up our 10 new Light Sussex hybrids.  He is BRILLIANT, very nice set up, nice and knowledgeable guy who, whilst selling us the chickens, gave us a massively inspirational look at his beautiful house full of home-sawn (by a mobile saw-mill) and self-felled wood beams, staircase and joinery.  We left there just amazed at the kind of things which are possible without resorting to dealing with 'big business' for building materials & full of projects! 

Anyway, I digress, back to the chickens.  We transported the chickens in a big cardboard box in the boot, and when we arrived home, between us managed to manhandle it onto a wheelbarrow, and then set off around the back of the house and into the field where I've got their run and house set up.  I wheeled the barrow into the run, closed the gate, opened one end of the box and stood back.



The Start of the Expanded Tymawr Farm Flock

As usual in that situation, nothing happened, and only with a mix of gentle tipping, grabbing and persuasion did all the chickens emerge.  They seem to have settled in really well - they've now been with us for two and a half days and I've just come in from shutting them up.  All ten still present and correct, all bright eyed, clean and smart!

They're just over 16 weeks old now, and I expect them to start laying at 20 to 24 weeks.  Full production level in time for Christmas!



The rest are hiding around the back!