Good luck. Maybe try Penzey's or My Organic Market, but I am doubtful that you'll be able to find anything. Your best bet might be to see if you can borrow some from a chef or fellow nerd who does his/her own. If I wasn't so busy today and tomorrow I'd offer some of mine.

Looks like I'm going to have a, pardon the expression, "sausage fest" this weekend. I picked up 13 pounds of boneless pork shoulder at Costco yesterday and have another 9 pounds of trimmings and the dark bit of pork loins sitting in the freezer. Looks like I'll make 10 #'s of smoked kielbasa, 5 #'s of smoked andouille, and 5 #'s of fresh breakfast sausage. Mayber I'll put the sausage in casings if they arrive by then, or else I'll just make patties. Now that I have my commercial grade stuffer, making sausage is a total snap. I can knock out 20 pounds in 20 minutes before linking.

You can buy sausage casings cheap at Union Meats at Eastern Market. Packed in salt in a small plastic tub, they need to be soaked in a couple of changes of water, preferably in the refrig overnight before using, but if you have a commercial sausage stuffer, why make patties?

That's a good tip on the casings. I just placed an order this morning and received a free upgrade on my shipping to "priority mail" so it looks like I will get them in time. I'll need to see what size casings Union Meats carries for future reference. I'm thinking about doing a couple of large sausages like mortadella and ring bologna and these require a specific size casing.

The only kind they've had at Union Meats when I've bought casings is standard pork casings--the size used for Italian sausages, bratwurst or kielbasa. Are those big casings pork or beef? Could be from very large pigs, I s'pose.

Ah. That's good to know. I needed to order sheep casings (22mm-24mm) for the breakfast links. The standard ones are fine for what you mention above, standard size sausage in the 34mm-36mm range. The big casings are hog and beef middles, or unfortunately enoug, beef bungs. They are not really edible and are used to contain the product until it has been smoked and/or steamed. There are also a wide array of synthetic ones available too for pepporoni and the like and as such, must be removed prior to consumption as well. Sausage making is not for the faint of heart.

What kind of stuffer do you have? I'm getting tired of fighting with my KitchenAid stand mixer - I can make decent enough sausage, but it's a pain in the ass, so I don't do it often. Unfortunately, storage space is an issue.

Mdt let me borrow one of these for a few months and it made things a breeze. When he took it back, it wasn't more than a couple weeks later that I ordered my own. Love it (and fwiw, the 11lb model is plenty sufficient for my needs).

That looks perfect. What's the height on that thing?

~22" high. base is ~11" wide and ~8.5" deep.

After two runs on the Kitchenaid, I bailed and got this from Amazon. It's actually a 7 pound model despite the fact it says 5 pounds. It is very well constructed and all metal (including gears).

Whats the problem with the Kitchen Aid stuffer? I was thinking of buying one.

The grinding works well, but it takes forever to stuff any decent amount of meat. The top shelf of the stuff can only hold so much meat that you are constantly having to add the ground meat. Then you need to continuously use the wooden tamper to push the meat into the stuffer to keep the meat flowing into the casing. If you think you are going to be making sausage with any frequency think about getting a decent stuffer.

Three hours to stuff 20 pounds of kielbasa with the KA versus 20 minutes with the stuffer.

I was going to state times like that, but thought I was remembering incorrectly as it has been some time since I have used the KA.

Holy smokes. That's a long time. And a lot of kielbasa.

Thus the reason I'm only making 10 pounds this weekend. Actually, we made it on Superbowl Sunday, starting damn early and finishing up the shrink wrapping at kickoff time. We have three links left, so that's why we need to make more. We throw it on the grill, or simply give the gift of meat to the neighbors. 10 pounds should get us through the fall. We always make fresh for Christmas (Polish tradition). Looking forward to the breakfast links. I just got my sheep casings in the mail yesterday, so all systems go for Sunday.

Made a test batch of bratwurst last week: the main downside of this model of stuffer is that it leaves a certain amount of meat un-stuffed (since the plunger isn't form-fitted to match the bottom of the chamber). For the first time, I actually weighed the leftover meat, and it came to just over 1lb. Easy enough to turn into patties, but means you really need to make at least 5lb of sausage to keep the linked:unlinked ratio to a reasonable level.