Okay, we’re back, Lieutenant Tom Papoutsis, Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department. We’re here in McLean, Virginia, Fire Station One in Fairfax County, and we just got done regrinding all of our meat.

As you can see now, we’ve got this all reground. Now, it’s a fine grind, and we’re going to get ready to start stuffing this sausage. Now, what I’m going to need to do is I have this off of here. Now I need to take this back off which is actually what we’re going to take and we’re going to put our sausage stuffing attachments on and that is basically going to be very simple. Like I said, you take a little bit of runner over when you get in here inside this ring. We’re just kind of clean that out, and that will actually go right back in with the mix, there we go.

And like I said, very carefully, watch the blade. It’s probably easier to just take the tip of your knife and just pull that off of there. Okay, so we’re going to get rid of that. We’re going to pull this out, and again, there’s a little bit of gristle there. We’re not going to use that. We don’t need the blade now. We’re not going to use the blade.

Now, we have two different sized what they call a sausage horn. This is what we’re going to put on here, and then we’re going to thread our casing on, and once we get our casing thread on, we’re actually going to put the meat back in, and we’re going to start making sausage, and we’re going to start casing it.

We’re going to use actually, this is for like a little tiny breakfast type sausages, if you will. This is more so for what we’re going to do today with the larger, more Italian sized. There’s actually bigger ones that you can use for like kebabs and stuff, and that’s one other thing, when I am putting this together, I am going to explain it to you. First off, I am going to just leave kind of a lot of this stuff in here or take it out, and there is a piece of gristle, we don’t need that.

But making sausage, there are so many different things to do with sausage. Now, this piece here, this little piece goes over the top and that holds the yoke in or the auger, and then this horn is going to go on top, and we’re going to slide this just like that. Now, we’re ready to start making sausage. Let the fun begin. Here we go.

Now, as I was saying, whenever you’re making sausage. The difference in sausages is actually what’s in them. When I say what’s in them, if I want to make salami, regular like general salami, I am going to do the exact same thing that I just did, but also I am going to do, is put black pepper and garlic in it and a little bit of salt. We’re going to use a bigger casing, stuff it in a bigger casing, and then that’s going to hang for a couple of months to dry, and you can make homemade salami.

Sopressata is the same way; you’re going to put different ingredients in. So, just because we’re making Italian sausage here, there’s other things you can do by just taking the same base ingredient as far as the ground pork is concerned, and then change the spices up, use a bigger casing, and with this, we’re going to cook it immediately or freeze it, whatever you want to do with it, but with the other sausages like your salami, your Sopressata, stuff like that, what you actually do is, you hang those.

They are done in the winter time when it’s cooler. The temperatures are cooler, you have a nice cool basement that you can hang them in, or some place like that. That could be a whole another show, we’re not going to get into it right now, but we’re going to get back into stuffing our sausage.