14.

Matt and I share one thing with our friends Ananda and Mario: We love to eat.

I mean, we really love to eat.

A lot.

And since we like to really eat great food, we're constantly exploring authentic traditional practices and ways to incorporate them in our own preparation and cooking.

Our hobby dovetails perfectly with my idea of trying to squeeze as much information out of my parents as I possibly can. My mom is somewhat used to this. Whenever she is cooking I look over her shoulder and ask questions, taste, and generally try to learn as much as possible. She's game. My step-father, on the other hand, is pretty much an untapped wealth of information. Since Ananda and Mario have joined Matt and I in trying to put away as much good, local food as possible this summer, I thought I'd ask Albino to teach us to make sausages. He was a trooper and we had a great evening together.

Step 1.
Start with pork butt (upper portion of the shoulder). We bought 15 kilos from Columbus Meat Market.



Step 2.
Remove the soft fat from the meat, leaving the hard fat. The names explain the difference. The soft fat is, quite literally, softer and lumpier, and very difficult to digest. The hard fat is whiter and much harder and looks like a solid separate layer of fat underneath the skin and on top of the muscle. Trust me, you want this stuff.



Step 3.
Use those muscles and grind the meat.



Step 4.
Prepare your spices. We used coarsely ground pepper and coarse sea salt in all of the sausages and fennel in half of them. Pretty much any dried spice can be added: red pepper flakes, paprika, whatever catches your fancy.



Step 5.
Mix for an interminable amount of time. Use your hands and keep going long after you think you should stop. Obviously commercial sausage makers can't mix by hand, but since we were only working with 15 kilos of meat, we could. This is the secret to fully developed flavours.



Step 6.
Taste. Yes, really! How else are you going to know if you have the right amount of spice?



Step 7.
Soak the casings for about 1/2 hour and then rinse them in fresh water. This will give them elasticity and make them easier to handle. Thread them onto the sausage stuffer component of the meat grinder and then run the meat through again.



Step 8.
Twist the sausage to make links - otherwise you'll end up with the mother of all sausages!



Step 9.
Taste test.



The whole shebang including clean-up took us less than three hours, and each couple ended up with about 70 sausages at a cost of less than 50 cents/sausage. We vacuum packed ours and put them in our extra freezer. Enough sausages for a year!