can i use this? it's all i have at the moment without having to special order
Sure, you'll just get thinner sausages, no problem. I would recommend though to use real hog casings rather than collagen casings, if you can get your hands on them. You get a much better texture and snap for the finished sausage. In addition, many sausages need to be blanched, and you can't do that with collagen casings because they dissolve in water.
Natural casings are sold packed in salt and will last for years in the fridge. If you decide to get some, I'd recommend to stock up on smaller sheep casings as well, which are what you need for things like hot dogs, Nürnberger, and similar.
i just realized..i don't have a meat grinder (could get those mixer attachments) and don't have a sausage stuffer. maybe a piping bag with a large tip?
Filling casings without a dedicated stuffer is a pain, to say the least. It is possible to get the farce into the casings with a funnel and a lot of patience. But it really is no fun, very slow, messy, and you will likely end up with a fair few air inclusions.
When I started out, I used a stuffer horn on my meat grinder. I would not recommend this. It is very slow and tedious that way, and also difficult to avoid air inclusions. In addition, there is no feedback. The farce just keeps moving, regardless of what happens at the horn, and you can get blow-outs. Worse, putting the farce through the auger in the grinder compresses it a lot and tends to smear the fat. When that happens, it really ruins the texture of the sausage.
Slow filling rate is a problem also because you need things to stay cold. If the farce gets above around 12 ºC, you run the risk of the fat smearing or, worse, the emulsion breaking. The longer you muck around trying to get the farce into casings, the warmer it gets.
I strongly recommend to get a dedicated stuffer. There are lots of quality differences; it really pays to get something solid. In particular, metal gears are essential, and I would look for all stainless-steel construction, including the piston and horns.
This is the one I use, from Hakka Brothers:
That is a 3 litre one; you can get them with larger cylinders as well. I can fit just under 2.5 kg of farce into the cylinder. For my purposes, that is enough. I've made batches of up to 6 kg with it; it is not a big deal to refill halfway through the process.
This model is built like a tank and will last several centuries. Note that there are almost identical-looking stuffers that are of inferior quality. They often have poor-quality gearboxes using plastic or brittle gears. Also pay attention to the differences in the crank design. It needs to have a wing nut, otherwise it will endlessly come loose. And the crank needs to be strong. For denser sausages, such as salami, it takes a surprising amount of force to get the farce through the stuffing horn.
Prefer stainless steel stuffing horns to plastic ones. The plastic ones scratch with use and during cleaning and quickly become unhygienic.
The main drawback of the stuffer I have is the elbow between the cylinder and the thread to attach the horn:
You end up with nearly 300 g of farce in the elbow when you are done. For fresh sausages without nitrite, this usually isn't such a big deal because you can just use that remainder to make patties. But for emulsified sausages or recipes containing nitrite, you have to wait for the nitrite to convert to nitrous oxide before frying. (For salami, you can use the remainder to make skinless Pitina style salami.)
There are other stuffer designs that minimise the amount of farce that gets left behind, such as the ones from LEM and Friedr. Dick.
These stuffers do not have an elbow and leave only a very small amount of farce behind. One problem with these stuffers is that they are rather light and you have to clamp them down to avoid having the slide around on the bench.
There are also horizontal stuffers that do not have an elbow:
These are generally lighter duty and difficult to use with dense farce, such as for salami, and they require clamping down.
Avoid stuffers that look like these. They are useless toys.
