A few months ago we hosted a sausage-making workshop organized by SENNAR, an education program sponsored by the Brazilian government. Everyone participated—me, James, my sister Tatiana, all of our employees, and Oscar. (He’s a chef in a dog’s body.) Before moving to the farm, James and I also took a great sausage-making class at Chicago’s Kendall College.

Unruly class member

Class disciplinarian

All you need to make sausage at home is an electric mixer with a meat grinder attachment (most Kitchen-Aid’s have this), some hog casings, and tool to stuff or encase the sausage. Actually, you don’t even have to encase the sausage; you can simply mold the ground sausage meat into patties or fry it in a pan to add to pizza and pastas.

Hog casings are pig’s intestines that have been washed and treated. The membrane encasing sausage meat is intestine, or a synthetic collagen made to resemble intestine. You can buy real or synthetic casings at The Sausage Maker, an amazing online store for all of your sausage needs. (My former catalog of choice used to be Anthropologie. Now I spend my free time drooling over curing salts and sausage prickers.)

Back to casings—we get ours from our pigs, which we kill and butcher on our property. First, we wash the intestines thoroughly with water, then turn them inside out with a bamboo rod and wash them again. After about seven to ten washes, we soak the intestines in water and limejuice. Why all of this fastidious washing? Because the intestines run from the stomach to the anus and are filled with digested materials on their way out of our bodies. (In other words, intestines are filled with poop.)

Then we take a small plastic spatula with rounded edges and scrape the cleaned intestines. We learned this scraping technique at our SENNAR workshop. It’s miraculous! Basically, the plastic spatula scrapes away the intestines’ lining, making them translucent and as thin as rubber bands. After scraping, we wash them again, inside and out. Now they are ready to use for sausage. I am amazed by how fine and light yet incredibly strong casings are. Their strength allows casings to hold in all of a sausage’s delicious fattiness, and gives the eater that amazing snap when biting into a sausage.

In homage to our workshop, here’s a great recipe for fresh Italian sausage. What is a “fresh” sausage? It’s one that is cooked and eaten hot. It is not cured or smoked, and has no curing salts in its ingredients.

Fresh Italian sausage
4 lbs lean pork butt, cubed. (The butt is not the pig’s rear end but its shoulder. The shoulder has lots of nice marbling, which is great for sausage.)
1 lb pork fat, cubed
5 tsp coarse Kosher salt
5 tsp fresh black pepper coarsely ground
2 cloves garlic, finely minced
2.5 tsp fennel seed (Yum. This adds such dimension to the sausage)
1 tsp anise seed
Crushed red pepper flakes to taste
Medium hog casings, if making links.

First, it is imperative to KEEP YOUR MEAT COLD during the entire sausage-making process. Sausage that gets too warm will “break,” meaning the fat and protein will separate from each other when cooked, and you’ll get a mealy or crumbly texture to your cooked sausage. You want a smooth but firm texture. You want your sausage to glide not crumble! So I recommend cutting up the cubes of meat and fat, freezing it, then defrosting it just a little bit. You can put it through your grinder nearly frozen, and it comes out much better than at room temperature.

First, mix the spices together in a bowl. In your meat grinder, grind the chunks of nearly frozen meat and fat together using a coarse grinding disk.

Use your mixer (with either the palette or bread kneading attachment—not the whisk) to mix the ground meat and the spices. Ideally, this mixture should become a sticky ball, where the fats, meat, and seasonings make a “primary bind” as the charcuterie boys call it. The more you knead your meat mixture, the more the meat’s protein (called myosin) develops, and the stickier it becomes.

OK, so you have your perfect sticky ball of meat. Take a little, golf ball sized round, make a patty, and fry it on the stove. Eat it. Enjoy it. Have some wine. This is your taste test, to make sure your seasoning is on point. Before you stuff a sausage, it’s best to test it. This way, you can add more seasoning (or more meat if it’s too salty) before you go through the trouble of stuffing.

Stuffing:
The same mixer you used to grind the meat also comes with a plastic stuffer attachment. Wet your casings, slide them on to the nozzle, then turn on your machine and stuff. When your casings are filled, twist them or tie them into links. Then prick these links with a needle, knife tip, or sausage pricker to get out air pockets.

Listen, I’m not going to lie: stuffing is hard. The casings are slippery. The meat squirts out in uneven clumps. It takes practice. My first links alternated between fat little maki rolls and weirdly pencil-like things. Oh, well. They all tasted good.

Refrigerate your fresh sausage and use it within 3 days. Or, as our Kendall College teacher said, immediately if you are using store-ground meat. (It is not as sanitary as grinding your own.) Or you can wrap sausages individually and freeze.

Here’s an inspirational little quote, to get you excited about your sticky balls:
“Sausage involves craftsmanship in the kitchen, care from the cook, and devotion from the eater. There may be no finer package of protein, fat, and seasonings than that which resides within the transparent but resilient hog casing—and none more humble.”
–Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn.

We’re on high alert tonight. Our lovely (and very pregnant) sow Mona will probably give birth in the next 12 hours. I’ve whispered in her ear to please try to push those piglets out sooner (how about 7 PM?) rather than later. But Mother Nature doesn’t care about my bedtime, and the piglets will arrive whenever they please.

How do we know that it’s Mona’s time? First, she lost her appetite. Next, she started breathing heavily. Milk began to leak from her teats today and (read no further if you’re squeamish–this is a farm blog, folks!) her vulva is really swollen and red. (The picture above says it all, really.) We’ll check her periodically to see if her water has broken. If it has, that means piglets are on the way. Births can last anywhere from 1-5 hours. Sometimes there’s a long wait between piglets, and sometimes they slide out one after the other. I’ll let you know how Mona’s birth goes. Hopefully we’ll have 8-12 new additions by morning.

Caul fat is a membrane of fat that encloses a pig’s intestines. Fat, unfortunately, has a bad reputation these days. We tend to think of it as greasy, unnecessary, or harmful. We might not think of fat as being beautiful, but caul fat is just that. It looks like lace. It is blindingly white and not at all oily.

In Jennifer McLagen’s book “Fat: An appreciation of a misunderstood ingredient, with recipes,” the author argues that, if used properly, really good animal fat gives food incredible flavors. About pork fat, she writes that, depending on the breed of pig and their diet, “pork fat is mostly monounsaturated in the form of oleic fatty acid, plus it contains palmitoleic fatty acid, which has antimicrobial properties…Pork fat’s low levels of polyunsaturtaed fatty acids means it doesn’t turn rancid easily and is very stable when heated.”

Caul fat turns a lovely golden brown when cooked and is indicated for wrapping around lean cuts of meat. So, when baking our Christmas turkey, I decided to try something new—in order to keep the breast meat tender, why not cover the bird in caul fat before slipping it in the oven? (We just happen to have an excess of caul fat around here from our pigs.) I draped that lacy membrane over the bird, and the results were incredible! The fat melted to a thin, crispy webbing. The breast was extremely tender and juicy. Caul fat is my new best friend.

Here’s the turkey recipe. I’m not specific with amounts because it really depends on the size of your bird. You can ask a local butcher to get you some caul fat, especially if you live in Chicago and have access to places like the Paulina Meat Market.

In a small bowl, combine the following:
Minced garlic
Kosher salt (not too much, because the fat will add some saltiness)
Fresh rosemary
Black pepper
Lime/lemon/orange zest (again, not too much)
2 bay leaves

Rub the bird with lemon juice and olive oil. Give her a good Swedish massage. Then apply the garlic-spice rub over and under the skin. Slide the bay leaves under the breast skin; when the bird cooks and its skin becomes transparent, the leaves look very pretty underneath. Let the bird sit, unstuffed, in the fridge over night. The next day, let the bird get nearly to room temperature (so you’re not putting it in the oven ice-cold.) Stuff the bird if you like. Give the bird a generous coating of honey or maple syrup. Soak the caul fat in lukewarm water to loosen it. Stretch it out carefully, place it on a towel, and pat dry. Drape your bird with the caul fat. (I had to carefully cut my piece of caul fat in half, because it was enormous.) Then place the bird in a roasting pan with a rack, and cover in aluminum foil. Cook depending on the turkey’s weight. In the last 30-or-so minutes, take off the aluminum foil, brush on some more honey/maple syrup, and let it get nice and golden.

If anyone actually tries this recipe, let me know how you like it. I’ll be making it again next year for sure.

In a bag, of course. We weighed three of Mona’s brood today. We’re keeping the three biggest, longest piglets which we have named Red, Pinks, and Spots. The other piglets will be sold, which means they’ll be raised and fattened on other farms. Here’s Red, chillin’ in her weigh bag. She weighed a whopping 14 kilos (around 30 lbs), which is great for a 45-day-old pig. Once the piglets get in the bag, they are amazingly calm. Maybe they feel swaddled?

One of our mother pigs, Iracema, gave birth to 6 healthy piglets. Iracema got so big during her pregnancy we though 20 piglets would be born, but sometimes less is more; these 6 pigs will not have to compete with a dozen other siblings for their mother’s milk. We have 5 mother pigs on the farm: Mona II, Julieta II, Serena (aka Crazy Eyes), Iracema, and Clara. Our stud is named Barto. He’s a big guy who likes getting his ears scratched. We have brushes outside of each of our pig pens, so we can rub the pigs’ backs and bellies. Most of the pigs like this brushing business; some just squirm and squeal. Our pigs are a mix of Lean variety and Landrasse (or Landrace). The Landrace breed was developed in Denmark by crossing the native pig with the Large White. Danes refused to export live pigs until World War II, when the best specimens of the breed were exported to Sweden. The progeny from these pigs eventually reached England and Ireland. According to the online Encyclopedia Britannica, Landrace pigs have “white skin” and are a “lop-eared pig with a long middle, light forequarters, and excellent ham development.”

Outside of our 5 mother pigs and Barto, we have 19 pigs for “engorda” or fattening. These pigs are fed a combination of grains, fruits, greens, sugar cane, and banana tree trunks multiple times a day. We will harvest the engorda pigs for hams, and eventually prosciutto and sausages. I got the term “harvest” from Barbara Kingsolver’s book, “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.” I like the term “harvest” as opposed to other terms like “kill” or “butcher.” Not because “harvest” sounds prettier — these pigs will be killed and we will eat their meat, and there is no way to deny or obfuscate this fact. To me, the term “harvest” implies that care was taken in raising these animals. That their deaths are part of a longer process, and that they lived well during each stage of their development.