Homemade Potato Sausage

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Max and I have a certain affinity, and affection, for potato sausage.  Not only did he grow up having it as a Christmas Eve meal, but we also requested it for our Wedding dinner.  It holds special memories for us, AND, it's super delicious!  
When we started planning our own special Christmas dinner, we both knew that potato sausage was at the top of the list...with one fairly big problem...we had no idea where to find potato sausage around the area.  Oh well...we decided we would make our own!  Which turned out to not be as hard as we expected, and was fun to do together!  

Homemade Potato Sausage
{used Oien Family & Veggie Venture recipes}
5 lbs. red potatoes; washed, peeled and chopped
3 lbs. meat (we used half ground beef, half ground pork)
2 large onions, chopped
salt and pepper, to taste
Tbsp. allspice
sausage casings

Take your chopped potatoes and onions and send them through the sausage grinder machine (Max got it for his birthday and that things seriously ROCKS!)
 Take your meat and send it through the grinder.
 Mix ground potatoes, onions, meat, and spices together.  Using your hands works the best.
 Definitely recommend frying up a small piece of your mixture, to make sure you have the right amount of spices.  We made adjustments to ours, after tasting it cooked.
 Have your sausage casings soaking in warm salt water, for at least an hour before you use them.  We got ours from a local butcher - it was $5 for that entire amount, and we probably only used 1/4 of them!  To be honest, they kinda grossed me out, but oh well!  Our sausage turned out so good!
Our meat grinder converts to a sausage stuffer.  I also read about using a bundt pan to stuff your sausages.  "Shimmy" your casing onto the nozzle part, getting most of the casing bunched onto it.
 Begin sending the ground meat and potato mixture through the stuffer, filling up the sausage casing.  I have no pictures of this part, because it is definitely a two-person job.  Max sent the mixture through the stuffer, and I held the part that was filling up, making sure to get the correct amount inside.  Tie knots at the beginning and end of the sausage.  Our first sausage!
 We made 4 sausages, each about 2 feet long, and then set them in room-temp water in a big pot.  Add a bunch of salt, and turn the burner on.  Let the water come to a boil (it took about an hour), then put the lid on, and turn off the heat.  This ensures that the sausages are cooked.  I then put the sausages in a container with a little bit of the cooking water, to keep them moist.  When I was ready to fry them on Christmas, I took one out and fried it in a pan.  We kept the rest of ours in the fridge, because we have been eating it all week, but you could also freeze them to be used later!  
After frying lightly on both sides, our sausage was ready to eat for Christmas dinner.  We had ours with boiled red potatoes, lefse (a sort of soft, Scandinavian flatbread made out of potatoes!), and peas...we like potatoes around here, can you tell?!
It turned out to be an adventure to make our potato sausage, but it really wasn't hard.  It probably took us 2-3 hours to get them done, including the hour to boil the water.  I think next time, we will be more familiar with the process.  We have decided we will definitely be making more in the future.  And Max already has grand schemes to make other kinds of sausages this spring and summer.  Oh the joys of a sausage grinder, ha ha!

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1 comments

  1. That sounds like a fun process, but the whole casing thing grosses me out as well. Anytime we buy them from the farmers markets I ALWAYS de-case them before cooking. They hold their shape and don't have that "snap" to them.

    Yours look and sounds amazingly yummy...

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