When I met my fiance he told me all about his mother's potato sausage. Ms. Sue has been making her famous Swedish sausage every year at Christmas for years, and she started making it out of necessity. The store where her mother bought it when she was a child stopped selling it. Ms. Sue knew that she could figure out how to make it herself, and so this delicious Swedish family tradition began.
At most family gatherings, you will typically find me in the kitchen offering to help. This year I was offered an official position in the famous family sausage making process. Weeee!!!
The first thing you have to do is find yourself a party bucket! I mean get yourself a REALLY large one. Big enough you could probably let a small child go for a swim in it. Then you're ready to get down to business.
Potatis Korv - Swedish Potato Sausage
3 lbs. ground chuck
3 lbs. ground pork
12 large red or yukon gold potatoes
3 medium onions
3 tbsp. salt
2 tbsp. pepper
10 feet of 4 1/2 inch pig casings
Pour all of your ground meat into the party bucket.
Grind potatoes in a potato grinder. Drain excess water and add to your party bucket.
Add onions to food processor and chop fine. Add to the party bucket. Do you see a theme here?
Allow me to introduce the genius behind this yummy sausage...Ms. Sue who is adding the onions to the mixture.
Add salt and pepper.
Now get in there and make everybody get to know each other! This part was a lot of fun! I felt like a human mixer.
Ok maybe I was having a little too much fun with this, but hey it IS a party bucket after all!
Ms. Sue had the casings frozen in salt water. She put them in the sink with warm water to defrost them. Then she rinsed water through them. She referred to this part as "making balloon animals". Will you make me a reindeer please?
Now time to assemble your sausage maker. Fill the sausage stuffer with your meat mixture. Do not fill too full! I found if you do this it will come out the top when you start to make the sausage. That's how you learn right?
Take the reindeer balloon, uh I mean casing and push the entire thing up onto the stem of the sausage stuffer.
This is a two person job. One person has to crank the sausage stuffer, and the other has to catch the sausage coming out the end and hold onto it as it enters the casing. You can control how big the sausage forms by applying pressure against the sausage as it comes out. This is the part I'm gonna need a lot of practice to perfect. But as you can see Ms. Sue is an expert.
Cut the casing with scissors, then tie off the end of the sausage in a knot. Put the sausage link into water. Then you can start another link. Ms. Sue let me try the sausage shaping part of the process.
Before the sausage stuffer Ms. Sue used to make the sausage by hand. Can you believe she made yards of sausage with THIS tiny little contraption? And she did this for years before deciding to invest in a sausage maker. What once used to take her all day, now only takes a couple of hours.
Isn't she cute? Ms. Sue now jokes that she's going to pass down this archaic sausage stuffer to me so I can make my own sausage.
Keep the sausage in cold water until you cook it so the potatoes don't turn brown.
Put sausage links into a pot of water and bring to a boil.
Boil the sausage for one hour, and while it boils poke each sausage with a sharp object to keep it from exploding. You can see that one has exploded already. I'm pretty sure that's the one that Ms. Sue let me make. That's what you get with a sausage making rookie in the kitchen. But no worries! We made enough to feed the entire neighborhood!
You can tell it's Sausage Time! The Sweds are hovering...
Here is the finished Potatis Korv.
It is served with Swedish Meatballs, fresh vegetables, and bread.
All in all I think I did ok for my first time making Swedish potato sausage. But the proof is in the puddin' as they say...
An empty pan is all that's left. AND... I got an official thumbs up from the queen of Swedish potato sausage.
What a wonderful time we had today. I will treasure this memory all year until we get a chance to do it again next Christmas. Thank you Ms. Sue for allowing this sausage rookie to get my hands in the party bucket and help you whip up a batch of your famous sausage. I had a blast!
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