Homemade Sausage Making

I think that there may be more than a thousand recipes for making sausage. and many ways to cure and smoke a piece of pork.
This got me thinking about the days when I first started to make bread. There are hundreds of ways to make bread and all of them are good. So I decided that plain, crusty white bread would please my taste and meet the need for bread. For several years I made plain white bread with a little variation. I got to the stage that i could put a batch of bread together without reading a recipe book. Then I started to expand my horizons and I added some Pillsbury graham flour and called it whole wheat bread. I made a lot of that. Then I bought a new cookbook and read about other bread recipes. After 53 years of making bread for my own table I can make about 20 kinds of bread very reliably.
About a year ago I bought a proper meat grinder and decided that I could make sausage. Ahh ! But what kind? I tried to concoct my own and that didn't work too well. Not bad but not good. I have decided that I will restrict myself to about six or eight sausage recipes until I can reliably get them right.

The guitarist Chet Atkins said on tv one night as he played four notes that those notes were the first ones he practiced. He practiced them until he could always play them the same. Then he added four more notes and played eight notes until he could always get them right.

I think that is a good standard to work towards. I will plan on making a limited variety of sausage until I can always get those kinds right. then maybe I will add a few more.

My "getting started" learning curve was a bit more difficult but in hind sight I never regret one moment.
Obtaining a secure understanding of food safety was my primary objective, then followed my first recipe for a fresh sausage that I pulled off the internet.
I would say when starting off, one should start with a fresh sausage. Getting the right feel for a good and consistent stuffing takes practice. Then comes speed as well, in the beginning it used to take me a long time to grind and stuff 5 lbs of sausage, these days after much practice and getting organized it helped me to stuff a batch of 10 lbs in very little time.
Cold smoking sausage takes a lot more experience, being comfortable with the smoker and knowing what it will do, how it will react in different weather conditions takes time to learn. Smoke intensity control and temperature increases are something that one can read about, but when it comes down to doing it yourself, it has many hurdles to overcome.
But once one has mastered that, the pleasure of achievement is good!

The internet is filled with sausage recipes, in the beginning I saved a lot of them, and they have been dumped since. I tried a few and they just don't work, more so if one is in the learning curve where I was (and still am), the recipe may sound good but that's all.
I learnt a lot when I joined this forum, the recipes are compiled by members with a lot of experience, and that helped me a lot as well.
And yes, at that point I also scaled down, to a handful that I am comfortable and happy with.
I do have a list of sausages that I will try down the road in time, but taking it one at a time is important.
And at some point I will have a "set" of a few good recipes that I know work.

Lastly, one remaining problem for ever will be the area where I live, people here have a tradition of their sausage taste, and introducing them to a sausage that is unknown around here is always met with very different reactions. I hand out sausage samples to family and friends to measure my success. Family like different sausages to what my friends from the South would like. And interestingly, the ladies all love the Chicken, Spinach and Feta, the men are more leaning to the Csabaii sausage with kick in it.

It's been an interesting ride so far and I look forward to the road ahead.

My favorite critics are the little kids. They don't have any preconceived ideas about how sausage should taste but I can tell if they like it by how much they eat. They will tell me too spicy but if it just doesn't suit them they find something else.. For the kids I make uncased poached sausage, large diameter gets sliced and the small stuff is just munched.