Tuesday, March 23, 2021

Fun with Sausages

We received an electric grinder/sausage maker from Home Depot in exchange for an unbiased, honest review. It led to a fun activity for my husband and I to enjoy together one afternoon: making boerewors (pronounciation: BOO-ruh-VORS), the traditional South African sausage, flavored mostly with coriander, cloves and allspice, and no garlic or onion.

It's been some years since we savored boerewors. Best I can work out, we last had some in 2016 when we visited South African friends in the U.K. It was memorable enough to photograph on the grill as one of our holiday snaps!




Dale also made some at our home in Massachusetts using a hand grinder one year, with our son. That was back in 2002. Making it then was an incredible amount of hard work, muscle-power and a lot of mess for an 11 year-old, so we didn't repeat it. At the time, I recall it was difficult to find the hog casings, and I'd felt fortunate in locating some at Whole Foods in Bedford, MA. I'd kept the leftover casings in the freezer.

Mixing the sausage ingredients together, and using an electric machine this time around was a great way to do it. We tweaked the recipe and blended things based on how we both recalled the flavor to be - mostly, MORE coriander. I even found the 19 year old hog casings in my freezer, carefully labelled and cherished all these years (remember this silly post? https://vignettes.mixmox.com/2021/03/freezer-song.html). They were still good! Even with an electric grinder and sausage attachment, it needed the two of us to coordinate the task of pushing the ingredients through and supporting the sausage as it filled sensuously into its skin (one recipe on Food.com did admit that 'grabbing hold of a second pair of hands at this point makes wors-making less traumatic.'). We only had one blowout!

We felt pretty satisfied and accomplished, and couldn't wait to sample our creation, but we followed directions and left the boerewors to rest and settle in the fridge for a day. And, this is what we had for dinner the next night - bliss! It was delicious, and made all the more so because we made it ourselves! And we knew exactly what was in it - no soy flour, natural flavors or corn syrup, with the taste of home!









4 comments:

Wendy said...

Brought back memories of my mother always making sausages from scratch. She would attach the grinder to the side of the counter (we called it a sideboard back them) and grinding away. She served it to the numerous friends and family who came by on most Sunday mornings for brunch.

Debbie said...

Wow, Wendy, what a lovely memory. Glad you shared it.

Shelley Burbank said...

This is fantastic! I want to make sausage. 19 year old casings? That is making me smile, Debbie.

Wendy, my mother also had a meat grinder as you describe. I think I still have one I picked up a few years ago in my "sustainability" phase...unless I gave it away in the "great purge of 2019."

Debbie said...

Yes, Shelley - I know, it sounds disgusting (but when you buy fresh hog casings you don't know how old the animal was anyway .. :-) hee hee.

Hope you didn't get rid of it, Shelley