Hi everyone, I’m scrodumb and I am a retail butcher and sausage maker in Toronto, Canada.

My culinary experience extends far beyond that but these days my specific interests are mostly meat and meat processing. Starting to get into charcuterie and expanding my sausage repertoire into fermented, cured, smoked and emulsified products. Will be making my first coppa and pancetta this coming week. Have some Cantonese style lap cheong drying too.

I’m happy to help with any meat related questions or troubleshooting, feel free to ask here or message me directly. Love bouncing ideas back and forth especially with other foodheads.

A couple weeks ago I ordered a half hog of Meishan pork for myself and made a bunch of sausages for my friends and family. The pic is my personal versions of Barese sausage (coiled) and Chipolatas (breakfast sized links). Both are super popular and I’m happy to share the formulations if anyone is interested. I have dozens more sausage formulations too, just ask. I can turn nearly any red sauce pizza recipe into a sausage. Hawaiian absolutely SLAPS. Other dishes too. I created a Cubano sausage that tastes just like the sandwich.

I’ll try to post every week or two but seriously if you have any meat related queries hit me up I’m always happy to help. Next post will likely be some tips and tricks I’ve learned and discovered in my journey.

  • Jeena@piefed.jeena.netEnglish
    31·
    5 days ago

    About 10 years ago, I worked at Palagicore, which was a small IT company, like a startup. We had about 20 people, and once a month or something we had a team-building event. We did things like laser tag, chocolate tasting, cheese tasting, go-kart driving and stuff like that.

    Every time, someone else had to plan it, come up with what to do, get the venue and all those things. And then it was my turn.

    So I came up with the idea that we would make sausages at the office kitchen. We were around 20 people, so I think we bought about 20 kilos of meat, basically one kilo per person. We also bought some cheap hand meat grinders and those machines where you put the sausage into the casing, I think about five of each.

    After work, we spent about four or five hours in the office kitchen making sausages. Everybody was involved, except the vegetarians, who later got some vegan sausages. After we were done, we grilled the sausages on the rooftop and had German beer, sauerkraut and sourdough bread.

    The idea was that everybody would eat some sausages and then take the rest of their one kilo of sausage home for their family. But in the end, everybody only got about half a kilo home, because we were so hungry after working on it for so long that we basically ate half a kilo each.

    It was also pretty difficult because the machines were cheap and nobody really knew how to use them. I was basically going from group to group, showing people how to make the sausages and telling them what they were doing wrong.

    One group was working really hard with the meat grinder, pushing and grinding and grinding, but almost nothing was coming out. The third time I came by, I thought, “Wow, they have so little done. What’s going on?” So I looked at their meat grinder and tried it myself, but basically nothing was coming out.

    I disassembled it and then saw what was wrong: they hadn’t put in the knives. There’s a knife inside the grinder that cuts the meat and pushes it through the holes, but they had forgotten to put it in. So they had been grinding and grinding for about an hour without the knife. Once they put it in, everything worked much better.

    https://jeena.net/photos/234