Costco Jones Gets Worse

This is an exciting day. I’m about to make sausage. Using ELECTRICITY.

A couple of years ago, I bought a hand-cranked grinder from Northern Tool. It works, but you would be surprised how hard it is to use. I made twenty pounds of phenomenal sausage, but then I put the machine away.

Since then I’ve gotten myself a Bosch Universal Plus mixer. I got one because I had been using one at church, for pizza. If you make bread–in LARGE amounts–this is probably the greatest machine in the universe for less than a thousand dollars. You can make dough for 14 pizzas at once, which is beyond amazing. In a Hobart Kitchenaid, you might be able to make three. In the biggest Cuisinart made, the number is six, if memory serves. I routinely made dough for nine pies at once in the Bosch. I’m talking about nine pounds of dough.

The mixer is not that great for other things. For example, if you use it to make cheesecake, you have to make sure the batter is very warm and loose, or else a lot of it will get stuck to the bowl and fail to mix. Live and learn, I guess. But it’s a versatile machine and a real workhorse. You can even use it to make pasta and berry juice.

I broke down and got the hideously expensive grinder for it. I could have gotten a stand-alone grinder for the same money, but the Bosch has stainless extruder plates (if that’s what they’re called), and it serves as the basis for other attachments, and it will take up less room. Could be a bad decision; we’ll see.

When I started making sausage, I originally intended to can it, but I froze it in vacuum bags instead. I can’t recall why. It may be because I learned that canned sausage can’t have sage in it.

I was hoping to duplicate the sausage my grandmother used to can. This is a real Appalachian treasure. You make sausage balls and can them in hot lard which is full of sausage flavoring. Best breakfast sausage I ever ate. The stuff I make is about as good, but slightly different.

I had a hard time finding fat. If you use lean pork, the sausage will toughen up like rubber in the skillet. I solved this once by adding pure lard, but you can also grind bacon up in the sausage. It’s very good.

Today I’ll be using Costco boneless shoulder. I can’t believe they sell this stuff. It’s a dream come true. It’s $1.89 a pound, and it’s a lot fattier and tastier than loin, so I’m pretty excited. I have a frozen cured jowl (jowl bacon) I may throw in there just to get rid of it.

It’s irritating that we have come to hate pork fat so much. It’s a wonderful part of good food, and the Nazis have made it hard to find.

I’m about to pop the shoulder open. I hope I don’t smell anything “off.” If I do, it means boar taint, and I’ll have to brine the meat with baking soda to get rid of it. I’ll post the recipe:

INGREDIENTS

10 lbs. pork (shoot for 40% fat)
3/8 cup brown sugar
3 tsp. pepper
2 tsp. cayenne
2 tbsp. sage
1/4 cup salt
1 tbsp. paprika

I’ll be using apple juice concentrate instead of sugar. I’ll need about half a cup. I found that when you substitute apple juice concentrate for sugar, you have to add about 25%. OOH! I have some snooty Hungarian paprika from Penzey’s! Guess I’ll be using THAT today.

I ought to make some Italian sausage for pizza. Mike suggested it. I am too lazy to use casings. I don’t think that would matter. Truthfully, they tend to detract from the sausage-eating experience, and they shink and cause problems when cooked.

I wonder if I could make chorizo. I’m pretty sure most chorizos are made from things like belly buttons and tonsils. I know how Hispanic businesses like to save money. Surely real meat would be better.

This Sunday my church is doing a play. I got buttonholed on the way out last week, so now I have to make food for the cast. I’m planning to make a pineapple upside-down cake using banana nut bread batter. This is really good. When people found out about it, they got on me to make a spare cake, so now I’m making the cast cake plus a stealth cake.

Pineapple upside-down cake is one of earth’s greatest foods. I don’t know why we don’t make it more often. I’m seriously considering making some for myself and serving it hot, with rum raisin ice cream. That would be sick. Also wondering if it’s a good idea to add rum to the cake. Surely it would be. It’s like a pina colada, and those go with rum.

I have like 12 pounds of frozen bananas to get rid of, and this is a great way to do it.

I’ll post sausage photos if it’s not too much work.

You should try this yourself. Play with the ingredients. Add garlic or whatever. Start with one pound, get the recipe right, and go to town. If you start with what I’ve written, you won’t make anything that isn’t fit to eat unless you go completely nuts. Give it a shot. You might change the world.

More

This is stupendous. This thing ran through 10 pounds of pork shoulder and 1 pound of bacon in about 15 minutes. Most of the time, I was cutting the meat so it would fit in the hole. If it had been pre-sliced, I think I could have done two pounds a minute with ease.

The machine rocked a little. I think I failed to tighten something. But it worked. Here is the meat after I mixed in the seasonings.

I used chipotle instead of cayenne. I had a couple of chipotles lying around, so I ran them through the coffee grinder. It seems like chipotle is milder than cayenne. I used about three tablespoons. I added an extra teaspoon of sage and a second tablespoon of paprika. I used half a cup of apple juice concentrate.

It smells wonderful, even raw. Costco is extremely picky about quality. Perhaps for that reason, the shoulder I bought had no boar taint. Here are the “loaves,” ready to go in the freezer to firm up. When they’re frozen, I’ll vacuum-seal them. I’m keeping one out for immediate use!

Next time I’ll use two pounds of bacon and eight pounds of pork. It’s slightly lean this time. I used a ratio of roughly 1:10. I ended up with eleven pounds. I believe the final cost is around $2.25/pound, before factoring in freezer bags. That’s not bad. This stuff is even better than Winn-Dixie, which is the best bulk sausage I’ve found around here.

The good Lord has given me all sorts of fun skills and hobbies. I really love doing this.