Homemade Sausage Supplies

[spincast]

Does anyone know where to buy sausage casing in the San Francisco area? Or have any good sausage recipes? Maybe a good Argentinean chorizo.

Every since my wife and I got the KitchenAid stand mixer for our wedding, I've been eyeing the meat grinder and sausage stuffer attachments. I think I'm ready to go for it.

[Nancy Berry]

Ask the butchers at stores like Tower Market, Lunardi's, Andronico's, Mollie Stone's, Draeger's or other stores that make some of the sausages that they sell. They might sell you some.

[Robert Lauriston]

Most butchers that make sausage will special-order you a tub of casings. Previous topic posing the same question:

http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/457310

See the Home Cooking board for recipes and discussion of those crappy attachments:

http://chowhound.chow.com/search?search[query]=title%3Asausage&Search.x=27&Search.y=7&search[class_names]=Topic&search[boardgroup_id]=10&search[from]=1+year+ago&search[sort_mode]=descending&search[board_id]=31

http://chowhound.chow.com/search?sear...

[hohokam]

Not a local source...but Butcher & Packer carries a wide selection of casings (pork, lamb, beef, etc) in a variety of sizes. They also carry a lot of other supplies you might want.

http://www.butcher-packer.com/

[AntarcticWidow]

I bought pork sausage casing from the meat counter at Cafe Rouge in Berkeley. They sell them in roughly 25-foot lengths and are ready to use. I did a variation on a Chiang Mei-style sausage using chicken instead of pork. We grilled them up and they were delicious!

[rworange]

Taylor's Sausage at the Housewives Market in Old Oakland sells sausage casings.

[RWCFoodie]

Be careful where you buy your casings: we needed some in a hurry recently so out of desperation I bought some at Draeger's as there wasn't time to sleuth a better source: they charged us $1.00 per foot which seemed really high (I bought 10 feet)... that seemed exorbitant to me... They were ready to use and our results were great! We used recipes from Bruce Aidell's books... see photos attached (This should be on the home cooking site I guess...) While the Kitchenaid sausage stuffing attachment isn't ideal, it worked fine for us. Also, I highly recommend the book "Charcuterie"...

[AntarcticWidow]

Cafe Rouge charges something like $19.95 a pound. The piece I bought was less than $5 for about 25 feet.

[SteveG]

That's ridiculous. San Francisco's Falletti Foods' butcher charges something like $5 for 10 yards, and they have different types of casings. They had lamb casings for our merguez project, they have pork, etc. They even threw in some pork fat for free, since we weren't being strictly traditional.

The casings weren't frozen or salt packed, and they were already clean.

[RWCFoodie]

Yes, we knew we were being overcharged but didn't have a choice at the time... Actually one of the others in the project bought some at Foodville in San Carlos - they didn't know what to charge him so they used the code for ground beef - I think he paid about $1.00 for about 10 yards.... but that was probably a one-time thing.

[gourmetwannabe]

While it's not chorizo,I just had some outstanding fresh lamb merguez sausages from a halal butcher in San Bruno (Besan's Int'l Market). Grilled and on a soft seeded bun with grilled onions was heavenly.
for a variety of different types and sizes of sausage casings, an online source like sausagemaker.com can't be beat

[Biffo174]

There's a local casing distributor in San Mateo, that you could call. Jordan Casing Company : 1(800) 349 3658. I'm in the Meat business, and most of the sausage makers I know in Northern California swear by the quality. I'm pretty sure the least you could buy is a couple of hanks, but that would still be far cheaper than a dollar a foot.
...A dollar a foot is robbery.

[Bryan Gros]

I've bought casings before at Ver Brugge in Rockridge. I used to say just 6 or 8 feet and they would bag it and charge by the pound. They only had "standard" casings though--no big ones or little breakfast sized casings. But I havn't made sausage in a few years.

[paul balbin]

Check this out. http://www.eldonsausage.com/ $ 7.45 for 60 feet. Been getting mine
for years from these people with no problems.
Paul