Stuffing Sausages

Stuffing sausages is labor intensive and the type of a stuffer used can make sausage making a pleasure or a difficult to perform chore. There is not much we can do to alter the taste of the sausage after it is stuffed into the casing and we strongly recommend to taste the meat when mixing it with spices. People make mistakes when reading recipes, they get confused with ounces and grams, they use different size spoons to measure ingredients, etc,.

Tip : taste before you stuff . We don’t expect you to eat raw  meat, though some people have been doing it all their lifes. Ever heard of a steak Tartar? Well, you can order it in a good restaurant or make it at home. A steak tartar is a raw ground beef, mixed with salt, pepper, some mustard, put some finely chopped onions on top, throw a raw egg, little pickle and all you need is a bottle of cold beer. That was the food the greatest warrior that ever lived, Genghis Khan, and his troops ate every day, though they used the horse meat.

Well, smile we don’t expect you to do the same as  there is a much easier way to taste your meat. Just make a very tiny hamburger, like a quarter, throw it on a frying pan and in two minutes you can taste your sausage. In case it’s too salty and there is no more meat at home, all you can do is to run to the nearest market and buy some ground pork and add it to your creation. In case the supermarket has only ground beef, buy it all the same. You will slightly change the recipe and you might even like it more. You are the artist, do what pleases you. A lot of famous sausages like Hunter’s sausage (Myśliwska ) are made of pork and beef. If you need more salt, nothing could be simpler, add more, but be careful, unless you want to run to the supermarket again.

Even professionals like to work together when stuffing.

Home Meat Stuffers

The first known mechanical stuffer we know of was a simple funnel where casings were inserted on one end and the meat was pushed with fingers inside its opening. There still exists Polish sausage named “palcówka” ("palce" means fingers) that was done that way.

The most popular method employed by home sausage makers is using hand cranked grinders with sausage tube attachements. It’s like in the example above with a difference that the meat grinder and not the fingers is pushing meat into the funnel.

Hand Grinder with a Stufing Tube

The knife and plate are removed from the grinder and the auger pushes meat into the stuffing tube. It wobles quite a bit as it is not held in place by the plate which was removed. The optional spicer will provide support for the auger and the wobling will stop. The main drawback of this arrangement is that it requires two persons to stuff the casing. One has to insert meat into the mouth of the grinder and rotate the crank carefully not to loose the fingers. The second operator holds the tube and casing with his hand  that works like a brake controling speed and and amount of meat that can be stuffed into the casing.

Horn Stuffer

The horn stuffer is the next device employed for meat stuffing and though the device looks cute and original nevertheless from the practical point of view is not much better than the hand grinder with tubes. It still requires two people to do the stuffing, though a one super big body builder might be lucky to do it by himself. Photo courtesy The Sausagemaker, Buffalo,NY

Piston Stuffer

The next design though still manually operated, fully qualifies to be called a meat stuffer.

It is a piston moving stuffer that can have horizontal or vertical orientation, vertical being most common. It is basically a cylinder that we filled with meat and on top of the meat rests a piston that pushes meat down when we rotate the crank handle.

There is a little built-in air valve into the piston to allow a release of air pressure that normally will be pushed inside of the sausage creating air pockets, On the bottom side of the cylinder we have an opening that accepts different sizes of sausage tubes. One person can easily control the casing and sausage speed with one hand and turn the handle that moves the piston down with the other. Photos Courtesy The Sausage maker, Buffalo, NY

Commercial Stuffers

Commercial stuffers like the ones on the left below have capacity of 350 lbs/hr. The bigger model on the right below has capacity 7000 kg/hr

 

Photo courtesy Koch Equipment, Kansas City, MO

After the meat is ground and mixed it has to be stuffed into a casing preferably as soon as possible. Nothing will happen if we have to stop the production and go out on a date what obviously takes preference, but it would be much tougher to stuff it the following day. Of course the mixed meat was placed in a refrigerator. Allowing the meat to sit overnight causes it to set up and absorb all this moisture that we have added during mixing and stuffing. The ample amount of salt inside will perform this trick and we'll be strugling with the casings blaming the whole world for it.

A lot of people know that a smoked sausage will be of higher quality when meat is seasoned over night which is basically a shorter, simplified version of a curing process, that should have be performed earlier. If you want to cure sausage that way (why not to cure it the proper way), grind, mix and stuff it first, then it can be stored for a day before it goes to smoker.

The most important rule will be to stuff your sausage hard and without air as the little air pockets will fill with water and will create spoilage. The first step will be to pack meat tightly in the grinder, horn or piston stuffer as the air will be pushed into the casing. That also creates unnecessary resistance during stuffing. Better piston stuffers come equipped with an air valve that allows accumulating air to escape outside. After the sausage is stuffed, any accumulated air pockets are visible to the naked eye and are simply procked with a needle or any type of sharp pricker and there is no need to worry about  tiny holes that will be gone as fast as it was made.

The exception to the above rule is when a long rope sausage is made that will be divided to equal links by twisting them. That would be impossible to achieve if the casing was stuffed hard.

The casing should have about a third of a cup of water inside as it acts as a lubricant for the entering meat. By the same token pouring water over the stuffing tube is recommended to increase lubrication. Some people grease tube lightly.

When placing a casing on a stuffing tube, it should go on loosely otherwise it might break.

Recommended stuffing tube diameters

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