You Can Make Your Own Sausage (Swedish Potato Sausage)

I don’t have any pictures of how the sausage is made. Sorry.

You are probably going to get more consistently good flavor and texture if you pay a professional butcher to make sausage for you. However, making your own sausage at home is really easy, you can control exactly what goes into it, and there are way more varieties of sausage you can try than you could possibly find at a butcher shop.

For this past Christmas (I know, it’s May) we made Swedish Potato Sausage. We normally try to make something from our families’ heritage for Christmastime, so a year or so ago it was Sauerbraten (which was…weird. Okay, but weird. Sorry Deutschlanders.) This past year it was Swedish Potato Sausage.

The recipe for Swedish Potato Sausage is basically equal parts by weight of pork and potato, a few onions, salt, pepper, allspice, and some milk to help stick it together. Then stuff it in pig intestine.

Unfortunately it appears to be impossible for small scale meat processors that serve small, local farms to reserve the hog intestines, so unless you slaughter your own animal and are able to save and clean the intestines, you will probably have to buy natural casings. You can find them occasionally in gourmet stores or order them online. They come in a vacuum-packed bag with a whole lot of salt. They'll keep for several months in the refrigerator, usually. When you open the bag, it smells like, well, pig intestines. You need to rinse them A LOT in cold water including running cold water through them, and then they shouldn’t smell. This also removes most of that salt.

If you don’t want to use natural hog casings there are other varieties available, including collagen casings. You need to make sure you read what size casing you are buying: they go by diameter. Don’t mistakenly order the thin-diameter casings for breakfast links if you want to make brats. The casings don’t really stretch; if you fill them up too much, they burst, and then you have to start over.

The Mahabharata of homemade sausage making is probably “Great Sausage Recipes and Meat Curing”, by Rytek Kutas, founder of The Sausage Maker in Buffalo, NY. You can buy it directly from them, and you should, because guys who write a book about how to make sausage are cool. It’s mostly technique though, and kind of short on recipes compared to how stuffed the Internet is with every imaginable kind of sausage recipe.

A meat grinder attachment for a stand mixer is pretty useful. You can often find this kind of thing used, or “refurbished”, and let’s face it, a 10 year old mixer or mixer attachment is possibly better made and going to last longer than one made currently. However, you clearly don’t need all this, since people have been stuffing sausage with just a funnel for, well, forever. The benefit of a meat grinder / sausage stuffer is that grinding your ingredients together mixes them for you, so you get better consistency and not, say, a chunk of one thing followed by a chunk of something else. You could, however, grind in a food processor, or just chop everything with a sharp knife or two.

Anyways, making your own sausage at home is one of those things that is so easy, it’s weirdly sinister that more people don’t do it. If you want to make smoked/cured sausage you still need a way to smoke it, you still need to add nitrite, and you need to know what you’re doing there so you don’t get botulism. If making normal, uncooked sausage, you should plan to make 10 or 20 pounds at a time and then freeze it; there’s not much point in making only enough for a single meal. You are likely going to make a bit of a mess in the kitchen, probably, and prepping and stuffing 20 pounds of sausage takes a few hours. However, there are sausage recipes for everything in your freezer that you don’t know what to do with. Will your kids eat beef cheeks? Maybe. How about kidneys? How about beef cheeks, kidneys, and crusty stale old bread you’ve been storing in the freezer, mixed with sage, nutmeg, and a few other seasonings, and stuffed into a sausage? There you go.