This certainly wasn’t your average Saturday night. It was a winter's evening and I was at Wellbeing Farm in Edgworth (between Darwen and Bolton), right on the tops (in thick fog I hasten to add) about to take part in The Wellbeing Sausage Experience. My cohorts were two girls in their late teens, that had been bought the course as a Christmas gift, a pig farmer, his partner and their son who was training to be a chef. We were all equally intrigued about the evening ahead.
Lee works for Whiteheads Butchers in Edgworth (celebrating 130 years trading this year) and has over 35 years experience in butchery.
Aprons on, hands washed and we were down to business, mixing pork mince together with rusk and water using our hands. Next we each took a turn throwing the pork mix into the machine that feeds the meat into the sausage skins – which incidentally are lambs intestines. The reason for throwing the meat was to ensure we didn’t get any air trapped. You don’t want air pockets in your sausages!
We each fed the very long tubes of intestines into the machine nozzle and began, tentatively, to feed the meat into the skins. Its good fun but certainly harder than it looks to ensure you apply enough pressure to get neither too little nor too much meat in (the latter resulting in burst sausages).
Once we each had long tubes of meat we all attempted to tie the sausages butcher style. I quite enjoyed this part but some of the other members of the group struggled to get started and there were some funny results.
The final part of the course involved sitting down to enjoy a selection of different sausages – these included pork and chive, pork and apple, and my particular favourite, black pudding and smoky bacon sausages (very delicious and would work perfectly with poached eggs and tomato sauce). This was also a good opportunity to ask Lee and Steve questions about the different flavours and fillings, as well as the pig breeds and locality of the pork supplied to Wellbeing.
I’m not sure if I’ll ever attempt to make sausages myself at home but it was certainly interesting to see the effort and work that goes into making this tea time staple; and as an added bonus we got to take home some of the sausages we’d made.
Sally
The Wellbeing Sausage Experience cost £65 and is part of a number of butchery and cookery courses run at the Farm. For more details on all courses at Wellbeing Farm click here
Comments