The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

There’s no two ways about it: stuffing sausages is time-
consuming. If I want to make a big batch of casing-stuffed
sausage, I’ll generally devote at least a couple hours of
leisurely kitchen time to the task—and that’s coming from
someone who practiced stuffing sausages in a professional
setting for many years. Complete amateurs can expect to
mess up a at least a few times, ending up with burst casings,
unevenly shaped sausages, and meat-smeared clothes before
getting it right.
Most meat grinders and attachments come with funnels
designed for stuffing sausages. They will work in a pinch
but can be a real headache to use. The main problem is that
they don’t push the meat through forcefully enough, so
stuffing the sausages takes five or ten times longer than it
should. All the while, the meat is slowly warming up. I’ve
had better luck stuffing sausage with a pastry bag (this
requires two people—one to squeeze the bag, the other to
pull the casing off the end as the meat comes out), but if
you’re really serious about sausage making, you’ll want a
piston-based stuffer that pushes the meat out with a lever
rather than trying to force it out with a screw. The result is
faster, tighter sausages with fewer air bubbles.
Most good butchers will sell you hog or lamb casings
packed in salt. To use them, rinse them inside and out with
cold water and let them soak in a bowl of cold water for at
least half an hour. Then open up one end of a casing and
thread it over the end of the sausage stuffer, leaving about 6
inches hanging off the end. Slowly extrude the sausage
meat, using one hand to guide the casing off the end of the
stuffer. When stuffing sausages, you want the casing to be