Homemade Cajun Boudin Sausage

About two Christmases ago, wife kitteh bought me a meat grinder / sausage stuffer. And then life happened and it sat out in the garage until today. I finally had some time to play with it, so I made Cajun Boudin.

Making sausages is all about technique. The grinding and the stuffing is not like anything else I'd done, so the first trials were messy failures. I finally figured things out and ended up with a decent amount of sausage. The filling tasted good, fried up in a pan, so I figure the sausages will be good, too.

First, you boil pork butt,pork liver and some other odds and ends. Those get ground up.

Then you add rice and spices to the ground mix and turn it over real good.

Threading the hog casing on the stuffing nozzle took a little effort, but once I figured it out, it was easy. Similarly, figuring out just how full to make the sausages took trial and error. My first attempt burst the skin and I had to stuff the filling back in the grinder. No loss there!

Making your own sausage is a non-trivial task. I'm guessing that you need to allocate about 4-5 hours for the effort. Next time I do it, I'll do a lot of sausage because it's the prep and the cooking that take the time. I figure doing two or three different types would only add an hour to the process.