Sausage Supper is FINALLY here!!!!

I've posted the full set of photos from the night of sausage making on the Flickr site. There's too many photos to put them all here. Here is the text, and trust me, the photos are well worth clicking on the link. WARNING: PHOTOS MAY OFFEND SOME PEOPLE WHO DON'T LIKE MEAT. DON'T CLICK IF YOU ARE SENSITIVE TO RAW PORK PRODUCTS.

Making 2,500lbs of sausage in one night - from cutting the meat to grinding, flavoring, stuffing, and smokin'...

Stephan and friends took out veins, glands, hair, etc. from the pork shoulders, being careful to leave in as much yummy fat as possible...

One plastic tub holds 80lbs of pork...

Each tub on the left is 80lbs of pork. Each tub on the right is 20lbs of beef. What you see here is 800lbs of would-be sausage...

All that meat gets ground by this one grinder, by this one man. Thankfully, it's electric. Can't hand-crank 2,500lbs of meat!

Totally reminds me of the Play-Doh "Fun Factory"...

What I can't show you is the little man with the white hair who holds the secret recipe for the seasoning. He makes it by the tub-full and sloshes it into this mixer (a 100lb mixer). The ground meat mixes here for about 10 minutes before moving on...

This is a store bought sausage stuffer (it later crapped out on us). It holds 100lbs of sausage at a time in the tank. It has a water tank, water pump, and the metal cylander is really just a big piston. When the water pressure builds up, it forces the sausage mixture out through the tube and into the sausage casing (pig gut). When all the machines crapped out, it was up to the rookie (aka Stephan) to hand-crank out the last 180lbs of sausage...

As the casing is being filled it's easiest to roll the sausage into a coil before cutting it into smaller links. If you look down the table you can see someone untangling some pig gut to load onto another stuffer...

Here's Anna cutting the sausage into more-or-less uniform lengths. Since most of them were less uniform, she changed jobs soon after this photo...

With all this raw meat flying around, some of it happened to land on the grill. Sausage patties and links- MMMMMM...

We smoke about 1/2 the sausage at a time on Friday, with the high school kids helping to rotate the batches...