My Sweetie got to go deer hunting this year for the first time in YEARS. He was able to go with a guy from our church who knows the area well. So, Sweetie’s 2 mule deer doe tags were filled by lunchtime on the day of their hunt!
We’ve been processing the venison to freeze, and that’s not a fun process anyway. It’s messy, but it’s necessary. And it is awful nice to have about 100lbs of venison in the freezers!
We decided to try something we’ve never done before… stuffing our own sausages. After processing the larger doe for all the roast cuts and some steaks and such, we decided that it would be best to just make ground venison out of the smaller one. And making sausage sounded like a good idea.
I still think it was a good idea, and I’m very much looking forward to enoying some venison bratwurst and polish sausage this winter, as we got about 30 lbs of sausage.
BUT – who ever thought of sausage to begin with? I mean, that first person who made sausages…. whatever were they thinking??? How do you decide that stuffing perfectly good meat into the intestines of an animal, for the purpose of storing the meat, is a good idea? How do you make that huge leap from cleaning OUT what comes OUT of the intestines to putting fresh, clean meat INTO them? This boggles my mind… srsly!
For our sausges we used real pork ‘casings’ – just a nice way of saying pig intestines….. And as soon as I opened the bag containing the casings, the questions about WHY this was such a good idea began to flood my mind, just as the horribly foul odor flooded my sinuses and filled the kitchen. I’m pretty tough when it comes to smells, but… oh. my. gosh…. That was a terrible smell!
The process requires that you rinse all of the perserving salt from the casings and soak them in warm water for 30min to an hour, in order for them to become pliable. This was a challenge on it’s own, that required my taking DEEP breaths and holding my breath as long as I possibly could so as not to have to inhale ANY whiff of the stuff, while running water through the package to clean all of the salt off. Then I plopped the casings in a bowl fulll of warm water and quickly vacated the area.
After grinding all the meat and adding the sausage seasonings, it was time to start stuffing the sausages. The next step in the process was to run warm water THROUGH the casings, and that was my job. OH MY GOSH again! The smell hadn’t improved by much, and as I filled these ‘tubes’ with water, they looked exactly as you’d expect intestines to look – blech. There were 2 casings that had a discoloring suggesting that they had perhaps not properly been cleaned OUT. Those 2 went directly to the garbage….
Sweetie proceeded to fill the casings with a contraption that looks just like a large caulking gun. The sounds that thing made while it was filling up the casings with the processed meat was enough to just about send me over the edge. It wasn’t just the sounds, of course….. it was the compilation of all of these ridiculous realizations about how nutty sausages really are. The anatomy of the casings, the odor of them, the appearance and possibility that not all of them were like sterilized and sanitized to the degree with which I would be MOST comfortable, the large squirt tube making tubish deposits into the casings with squirty sloppy kinds of sounds……… mhm…. it was really not working for me.
I know that we will eat these sausages, and that except for being made in my kitchen that they were made no differently than most other sausages we’ve eaten forever.
But the question for me still remains….. WHO thought sausage was a good idea to begin with? If it were me, I’m not sure I would have been quite as ingeniously resourceful as they were. I’m almost sure I would have stayed away from the ‘guts’ altogether, and thus never discovered any possibility of putting INTO them something that I intended to eat myself later… yah, no, wouldn’t happen. I’m pretty sure of that, actually.
Bless you, whoever you are that thought of sausage – you are a stronger woman than I!
