Grinding pig for sausage

Just some photos of grinding pork cushion meat up for sausage.  It's pretty straightforward using the KitchenAid grinder. As the cookbooks say, keeping things cold is important, so we start with chilling the grinder down before attaching it to the mixer.

And, then, you have your almost frozen meat.  I get the big hunk o'pig from the store (10-25 lbs in a package, cushion meat is around 10-12 lbs) and portion it into 2-2 1/2 batches, cut into 2 inch cubes then freeze it.  When I'm ready to grind, I thaw the batch out, partially, then cut it into 3/4-1 inch chunks (about the right size to drop down the throat of the grinder).

This the bag of frozen cushion meat before grinding, partly thawed.

There is no question that the whole "partially frozen" thing makes life much easier.  Not only is it easy to cube the meat, but it keeps the grinder cold.  Cold grinder means fat doesn't melt, which makes for much better sausage.  Note that this is pretty lean meat here because I've trimmed the fat and am going to grind it separately.

Keeping things cold while grinding is important, so the bowl catching the ground meat sits in a bowl of ice and water.

 

Hmm. Have to figure out how to rotate images

Here's what it looks like coming out of the coarse plate and in the bowl.

Finally, you get to the end, and there's this annoying sort of plug of meat at the end when you pull the auger out. You can run some paper towel down the grinder to push this out, but, on the other hand, it's not all that much.
So what is this "cushion meat"?  I wasn't up for buying a whole package of shoulder at Smart & Final (about 25 lbs, which is actually two shoulders), so I got the cushion which is about 9-10 lbs.  Turns out it's a leaner cut lower down on the front leg than the shoulder (I guess, it's the bicep, rather than the deltoid).  Often it's used for pulled pork and such, or cut into "ham steaks", even though it's nowhere near the back of the pig, where ham comes from.  In any case, it makes fine sausage, but you have to get some fat to mix with it, and that's a bit of a chore.  All the sausage recipes (e.g. Alton Brown) talk about using "fat back", but no supermarket around here seems to have fat back.  Fat backis the fat layer on the back of the pig, under the skin, above the loin/ribs, and is a nice hard fat which makes good sausage.  Think of the fat layer in good bacon or on a steak: it's firm and dense, and grinds well without turning into mush.

Sometimes you can get scraps of fat at the supermarket that they've trimmed off the pork they've packaged, but it's an iffy thing. Somehow, paying $3/lb for scraps of fat to mix with your $1.50/lb lean meat seems weird.  I found that I can get pig back (with skin on..) at a local meat market that does Mexican style cuts, but you have to strip the skin and trim the meat off.  It's what they make chicharrones from. I have no idea what the cut is actually called.