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Homemade Andouille Sausage

Based on this recipe: honest-food.net/andouille-sausage-cajun-style/

Chop up 1 onion, and sautee in a small cast iron skillet until the pieces are soft and translucent. Remove from pan, and let it cool.

While the onion is cooling, prepare the meat for the sausage. Cut up a large pork shoulder, remove the outer skin. Cut the meat and fatback into 1 to 2 inch chunks and toss them in a large bowl. Mix in all of the other ingredients except the booze: salt, curing salt, dry milk powder, minced garlic, cayenne pepper, smoked paprika, cloves, allspice, thyme and powdered mustard. Put everything in the refrigerator or freezer for 30 minutes to 1 hour, or until the mixture is 35° F or colder.

(The curing salt will give your sausages a pink color on the inside after cooking. More important, the curing salt will protect your sausages against contamination if you smoke them for a long time. The dry milk powder helps the sausages hold onto their moisture: If you skip this, they will still taste good, but they will shrivel up when you chill them.)

After the meat and spices have chilled, grind the mixture in a meat grinder. Place the ground meat back into the refrigerator to chill again. After chilling for another hour, mix in the cold red wine or beer and knead everything together. This will give the meat a different textore, more like a thick batter than ground meat.

At this point the sausage can be used by rolling it into meatballs or shaping into patties. If you want to make sausage links by stuffing sausage casings, now is the time to do so! Place the sausage back in the refrigerator, and prepare the sausage casings. Submerge about 10 to 15 feet of casings in warm water for ten minutes. Rinse the casings by running warm water through them. This will also reveal any holes that may be in the casings. Thread an entire casing onto the stuffer and fill it slowly. Coil the filled casing as you go. Fill all the casings before making individual links.

If you used curing salt in your sausage, you can hang the sausage at room temperature for 1 to 2 hours to dry. Otherwise, Place the finished sausage links back in the refrigerator to dry overnight.

When the sausages are dry, they can be smoked or cooked. Use a smoker, or cook them in the oven at 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Alternately, just fry them up in a cast iron skillet. Cook the sausages until the internal temperature reaches 155 degrees Fahrenheit.