Second Sausage - Lesson learned, chuck the product?

[FatDragon]

I made my second sausage today, after over a year since the first (my meat grinder is a massive pain to use), and I screwed the pooch. My first attempt last year was a bit of a mess with too many seasonings so I tried to go simple, just pork, rosemary, and salt. I figured 3 Tbsp. salt for 6 lb. meat was about right. Nope, judging by the end product, 1.5 Tbsp would probably have been about right. Note to self, add salt and seasonings slowly and fry up and taste samples before adding more.

Anyway, I packed the sausages in spite of the saltiness, if only for the practice. So now I've got a couple dozen sausages that are very unpleasantly salty. Is there any saving them? Maybe cut the casing and use the meat for spaghetti sauce without adding salt?

 

[passedpawn]

sauce sounds like a good plan.

 

[madscientist451]

How about opening up the sausages and mixing more meat with it?
You can buy ground pork if you don't want to run your grinder.
Perhaps look up some established recipes instead of "winging it"?

 

[brewbama]

I recommend following strict guidelines and recipes. Here's an example among many: http://extension.uga.edu/publications/files/pdf/B 1437_1.PDF

 

[bfish]

Cook the sausage without the casing with added water (say 1/2 cup per skillet) and potatoes. The potatoes will absorb the salt. The water is there to "wash" the salt out of the sausage.

 

[jmartie13]

I have a pretty thorough book on charcuterie, in the book they recommend 1.75 percent salt for the weight of meat. So for 6 lbs of meat (96 ounces) it would be 1.7 ounces of salt, which is around 3 tablespoons. I followed this salt recommendation for my first venison/pork sausage this fall and found it to be way too salty. For my second one I started with 1 percent salt and found that to be more to my taste, I did 3.7 ounces of salt for 22lbs of meat. The book does mention that peoples salt tolerance varies quite a bit.

For my "salty" sausage I just added it to recipes like pasta sauce or lasagna and didn't add much salt other than that. Worked out well.

 

[FatDragon]

Thanks for the suggestions! I'll do my best to salvage these sausages with sauces, potatoes, and the like, and in the future I'll be a bit smarter about my sausage making with proper recipes or at least proper proportions. I think @madscientist451 is onto something with the suggestion of buying ground pork as well - dealing with the ever-clogged grinder is no fun, though I'm now starting to wonder if I'm maybe an idiot and installed the blade the wrong way... It seemed right at the time, but now that I think about it I suspect that was a big part of my problem. I'll probably buy a pound of meat this weekend, cube it and freeze it, and see if the grinder works better with the blade installed the other way.