Well, this past weekend was my virgin sausage making experience, and I have to say it went pretty well.
I ended up making about 20lbs of pork sausage using recipes from here:
http://lpoli.50webs.com/Sausage%20recipes.htm
I made the Jamaican Jerk, Chaurice, Mexican Chorizo and Kielbasa (the Chaurice is VERY good). All of them were stuffed into 32-35mm hog casing that I purchased online through one of the venors someone linked in one of the sausage threads.
The I spent my Saturday morning at Peoria Packing and then cutting butts into 1" cubes. After this it all hit the freezer for a few hours to firm up and was then ground. The grinding process was pretty easy, but as not all of the meat had frozen up, there were a few clogs. It really does help to have the meat near frozen.
Stuffing was another story. I was using the KitchenAid sausage stuffer attachment and what a PITA it was. The first three batches I did had been in my fridge for overnight, so they were plenty chilled but still posed a problem for stuffing. The main issue was as we would plunge the meet down the tube, it would instead squeeze up past the plunger and back up the tube. So when we'd pull the plunger back up most of the meat was stuck to plunger (mine came with plastic plunger not wooden). Very frustrating and slow moving in general. Now, for the last batch (Chorizo) I didn't grind it until the morning, and had frozen it till most of it was solid. After grinding it went straight into the fridge and was stuffed a few hours later. This batch stuffed VERY easily (took 1/3 the time of other batches), and felt much colder. So my thought was that refrigerator cold is not enough to make stuffing easy.
Either way it was a fun experience and will definitely do it again, though it is quite labor intensive, and I don't see how you can do the stuffing portion alone using the KitchenAid setup. Well, I certainly do have a lot of hog casings in the fridge so I BETTER do it again
One thing I did notice is the sausages are quite dry, though I'll better be able to judge once I cook some more up as the taster samples could very well have been overcooked.
Jamie