Months ago my friend Gillian Byrne got herself some attachments for her KitchenAid mixer: a meat grinder and sausage stuffer. She then bought pork meat and we attempted to make sausages.
There were a series of failures.
First, she bought way too much meat for a first-timer. Twenty pounds of pork, bone-in. She butchered it and then ground it so much it had the consistency of baby food. When it was time to stuff, we broke countless casings and couldn’t get a uniform-looking sausage.
“I can’t stress this enough that we had no idea what we were doing,” she recalled. “The whole stuffing part of making sausages is such a feel thing. I remember our first attempts were hilariously lumpy and uneven.”
Gillian asked me to enlist my father.
“If he were my father, I’d be there every weekend learning something,” she said.
Mr. Pacienza grew up in a farming family of 10 in southern Italy, where no food went to waste.
At nearly 80 years old, my dad, Giuseppe Pacienza, makes lots of things himself: tomato sauce, jarred olives, prosciutto, pickled veggies and roasted peppers. Every September, he picks his own rapini at a farm in Caledon, Ont. He patiently waits for the last days of the season when he can get it for the insanely low price of $1 a pound. He then parboils and freezes it for us to enjoy all winter long. He went so far as to buy an extra stand-alone freezer to store it all. Every time we visit, we go home with an ice block of the green goods. It is his version of a loot bag.
Gillian is right. I need to absorb these skills before he’s gone. I need to think of it as a generational passing of the baton.
My father grew up in a farming family of 10 in southern Italy (they grew and sold figs). They lived in a two-room house and didn’t have much money. This necessitated using up everything they had – every part of the pigs and chickens and every edible plant. Nothing went to waste.
His roasted sausage-and-potatoes dish is mouth-wateringly good. Or better yet, get him to fry some onions and peppers and make a sausage panino.
Freshly made sausages by Mr. Pacienza.
I couldn’t think of a better way to use a Sunday: It would allow me to spend time with my dad while being productive, and I’d get to go home with a bag full of food. Plus, my friends could come.
On this particular Sunday morning, Gillian and I show up at 9 a.m. She is a fantastic home cook who loves to make food from scratch. She makes her own salsas, hot sauce and dried fruit for cocktail garnishes.
And now, with my father’s help, she’ll add sausages to that list.
Making sausage at home is a lost art in our crazy-busy convenience-food lives. But as I learned, it’s really not that hard. Take some ground meat, fat, salt and seasonings (and not a trace of nitrites or chemical preservatives) and stuff it all into casings. In one morning we made enough to fill our freezers with a dozen meals for each of our households, plus extra for my brother.
Here’s how we did it:
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[“My dad bought a pork shoulder and asked his butcher (with whom he’s on a first-name basis) to pass it through the grinder, but, and this my father says is important, “only one time.” The meat will be smushed some more when we use the sausage stuffer, he explained.”]]
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[“The night before, my dad seasons the meat with salt, paprika and fennel seeds. “] ]
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[“We prepare the casings. There are two types of casings: hog and synthetic. Hog casings are the traditional choice. They give a more rustic look and are natural, but they require a bit of prep work. Hog casings come packed in salt for preservation (we got ours at the butcher’s counter at a local grocery store).”] ]
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[“To avoid sausages that are too salty, we rinsed them under cold water. A proper rinse needs to include flushing the inside of the casing, which my dad’s partner, Mary Frascino, showed us how to do.”] ]
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[“She filled it like a water balloon. You can check for knots, twists and tears while doing this. When you’re done, it’s time to soak the casings for half an hour to rehydrate them and wash away any preserving salt. This also restores elasticity. Dry casings will tear on you.
We dubbed Mary, also Italian, the “casing queen,” washing and handling them with ease the way her mother did.
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[“As my father fills the sausage maker and cranks, I fill the casing. “Come on, fast, fast,” my father urged. And a few minutes later, “No, piano, piano, con calma.” (slow, slow, with calmness). “]]
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[“My father and I had to work in unison. If he cranked too quickly and I didn’t move fast enough, the sausages were too fat and would burst. If he slowed down, they wouldn’t be full enough or, worse, they’d be filled with pockets of air.
And if production overall slowed down, my father reminded us every 30 minutes, we’d be there all day. He prides himself on efficiency.
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[“Cook and enjoy. While we carried on making sausages, Mary put our first batch, with a splash of wine, in the oven to cook.”]]
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