Homemade Sausage Making

Hi all, I'm an avid student of home sausage making & curing and a newcomer to this forum. I've had some fantastic sausage results to date, but also a few failures, and i'm always trying to improve my technique and make the best sausage possible!

My question concerns a recommended practice I read in Stan & Adam Marianski's great book, "Home Production of Quality Meats and Sausages". In it, they recommend that the fat & lean in a sausage recipe be ground separately - the lean through a generally coarser plate and the fat through a fine plate. I've tried this technique several times with recipes that call for pork butt & pork back fat. I've gone to great lengths to ensure all my grinding equipment has been in the freezer until frozen cold, and also the pork back fat has been diced into 1cm cubes and frozen as well. However when I attempt to grind pure fat through a fine plate (1/8" or 3/16") all I get is a kind of white "spaghetti" coming out of the grinder! Sure enough, the fat is not smeared or anything, but it seems that I just can't grind pure fat cleanly into little bits this way, no matter how cold everything is!

On the other hand I also have recipes (eg, from Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn's "Charcuterie" that instruct to grind the cubes of back fat and pork butt all together through the same plate. I have had a lot more success doing this, as the fat gets mixed nicely with the lean meat as chunks of both pass through the grinder together.

I know there is probably no single "best" or "correct" method, but I would like to understand better the technique of separately grinding. Have I misunderstood what the authors mean by "grinding the fat & lean separately"? What is supposed to be the result of grinding pure fat separately? Tiny little bits of fat, like grains of rice?

Any help appreciated!

I have used both techniques and find very small differences when the sausage is on the dinner plate. I think that a very coarse grind on the lean would require a finer grind on the fat just to avoid lumps of fat.

Hi Nico.

Fine grind is o.k. for hot dogs, but I get good results if I grind everything with larger plate for say fresh/smoked/dry sausage. It shrinks while cooking. Most of the time I use 8, or 10 mm. hole sizes.
Also smaller grinders have kind of small feed screw/auger, if they can't take the meat/fat in one piece, they mush it.
Pure fat is hard to grind, I think you're doing fine. Fat will separate at mixing time.

Ohhh yes, welcome here, where the professional are. Meaning for example Mr. Chuckwagon......not me......

And as Paul Harvey would say, Good Day.

Just to muddy the waters further, here's another thing you might try: run the fat through a blender briefly, to liquify it.

It comes down to what size fat particles you want. Something which needs rather large chunks of meat and fat (hand-made traditional salami or chorizo comes to mind) would lack its rustic look, not to mention how the tastes mingle when you chew it, if you emulsified the whole thing. A coarse grind, maybe even a hand chop, would be more appropriate.

If, like my wife, your stomach turns when you see a chunk of fat, run the fat through a plate with small holes (maybe more than once, chilling between trips), or take it for a quick ride in a blender. (Harmony trumps tradition a lot in our family!)

"Thanks for sharing." ...got any good recipes, or better yet, any good insights to share? Thanks for being on the forum.

Thanks for the quick replies guys!

Seems like I'm on the right track, but it's just a bit odd to see the fat coming out looking like extruded pasta rather than ground up little 1/8" bits! Check out the attached photo, is it supposed to look like this?!

And once you've ground it, are you supposed to break it up into tiny little bits of fat by hand?

The fat will separate when you mix it. Many times the meat looks like that, specially grinding with small holes.
As I mentioned before, I grind the meat and fat together.

Nico, don't be afraid to play with your food. When the cold ground fat looks like that move your hand through it and watch it fragment. That is a lovely grind. most of us can only wish.

Thanks everyone! Good to hear it looks like a fine grind. The secret as I am sure you all know is to keep everything frozen - grinder plates, cutter, auger, funnel and of course the fat.

Kind regards,
Nico